Keeping the Flame Alive

I am in the final stretch of my book now. I started this book on February 15th, which means that it will have taken me six months to write, including the month of June, in which I only wrote 8 pages. As with all my stories, I’ve found myself revisiting the beginning more and more as I near the end. This book possesses such a strong voice (indeed, I think that’s why it sold so quickly) that I think it’s important that I don’t alter the voice from the beginning to the end of the book. However, it’s partly inevitable, that as I write more in Amy’s head, her voice evolves. It’s also a matter of the story. As the stakes grow higher, and things grow more difficult for my protagonist, she’s not going to be able to be as flippant and take things as lightly as she did earlier in the novel. her worldview will be the same, her snarky response to things, but at the beginning of the book, she’s on solid ground, and as the story progresses, it’s necessarily yanked frombeneath her. Very difficult to act flippantly on thin ice. In one more chapter, she’s going to break through that ice.

This has been an interesting balancing act. I wonder if part of the development is that when I wrote the first three chapters, I was in a hot rush. I had no idea about market, or format, or expectation. I wasn’t setting up a series, I had no editorial input. No rules, just write. I wrote chapters four and five during the whole “get an agent, set up an auction” process. Every chapter I’ve written since has been after the book’s sale to Bantam Dell. Part of the process has involved me trying to make the transition from writing “fun little story” to “contracted book” as seamlessly as possible. I want this book to live up to the promise in the proposal.

So there are my early-morning musings.

Things have been tough around here for the last few days. A business associate inadvertantly hurt my feelings, and though I understand there was no harm intended, I’m still feeling a bit bruised. It doesn’t help that there’s no one at home to comfort me and make me laugh at the situation. There’s a lot going on out in RWA-land that I feel I should distance myself from if I intend to concentrate on what’s really important (i.e. my book). I let myself get sucked in a bit yesterday, and I regret that. I also lay awake for a long time last night thinking about the fact that those who pay no attention to the lessons of history are doomed to suffer it again. Have fun with that.