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I’m spent the last few weeks working like a dog on Love Bites. It always makes me feel stupid when I realize I’ve gotten blind to my own work. You know, that’s one of the keys to being a successful author. You can’t be blind. You have to write a great story - that’s the threshold of pain. After that, you’ve got to scrub out all the extra words and strange phrases, the dangling participles, the overuse of “that,” the obscure use of “it,” remove all but essential adverbs, dump as much passive voice as possible, get rid of pronoun pox, all omniscient voice, and eliminate head jumping that reads like fleas on a dog.

If a submissions editor has to pause to wonder what you meant, you haven’t done a good job. If you didn’t take the time to rewrite a sentence riddled with pronouns and adverbs, they’re not going to take the time to keep reading. Submissions editors have far too many manuscripts to read to waste a lot of time wondering if the author can fix their own writing blunders—even if the story is promising. Your book is an investment, a bet on sales. If it’s going to take rework and handholding to bring a manuscript to market they aren’t going to bother. Friend and fellow author, Keta Diablo, reminded me of that a few weeks ago.

After spending weeks and weeks on my novel, honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was get intimately familiar with every single word. Honestly, that’s exactly what an author must do. Maybe when I have 20 of these under my belt, it won’t be so difficult. Maybe I’ll write them better right out of the chute. Certainly that’s a goal to strive for but until then, I’m examining every word.

I hear from unpublished authors all the time who cannot figure out why this awesome story they wrote isn’t getting a contract. Sometimes it’s where you send the book—your novel must fit with their genres and sometimes it’s what’s hot in the market at the moment. Is it fair? No, but it’s reality. Or perhaps you really need to take a serious editing pen to your work. I was pretty sure my novel was coming in around 69,000 words. When I finished editing, I was around 64,700. That’s a lot of its, that’s, adverbs, dangling participles, passive voice and unnecessary information. Sometimes when I’ve got my finger hovering over the delete key I start to sweat. “I really like that paragraph or phrase,” I think. But unless I can find a way to make it work with the story, not against it, the words have to go.

I spent several hours writing the summary and at least an hour trying to write the dreaded, 300-word jacket blurb. Then I pressed send.

My next project is a children’s book. The working title is Counting Raindrops and features a little boy named Joey, who is frightened of thunderstorms.

I’m doing a zippitydoodah for my brother in-law, Mike, who should return after a very long year in Iraq. Blessings to my nephew, Justin, who is serving in Afghanistan and to all our soldiers near and far, past and present who risked their lives for our freedom.

Thanks for stopping by.

Until the next time.
Margie