I recently wrote the beautiful words “THE END” at the end of my fifth novel. Many of you were keeping up with my daily posts about how far I’d gotten on the project. I’m so thankful for the encouragement everyone offered me toward the end when I felt like I was literally nine months pregnant with a baby that just wouldn’t come.
It’s not that I had a hard time writing the last scenes. It’s that new scenes kept popping into my mind and interrupting my outline of events. I wanted to write the last scene with everything within me, but I couldn’t because these other scenes needed to be told first. These scenes would alter the final scene.
So I finally finished it. Now what?
This book has been in the proposal stage with several publishers on and off for the past year. Currently, one publisher still has the proposal. I had not actually written the book yet though and knew I needed to get moving on it…just in case. So I set a deadline to finish it by the end of July because my next novel, To Laugh Once More, is releasing on September 8th (if all goes according to plan), and I desperately needed to have this other book finished before starting on the final revisions of the new release.
What happens to this newly written book?
It will sit in my computer (I call it cooking in the crock pot) for the next little while, while I get the new release ready. I have a few other projects I’m preparing for December releases, so this new book will stay on low for a while. If we get word from the publisher that’s looking at it that they’d like to see the full manuscript, then I will pull a few all-nighters and get it ready for their review. Usually once a book has cooked a while and I return to it, I see the mistakes I’ve made with grammar, spelling, plot errors, continuity errors and more. I’m hoping we’ll get word back that they’d like to see it. If not, I’ve got some ideas for how I can make this book come to life.
The story is currently titled Somewhere in Daughtry Bayou and is set in Cedar Key, Florida. The hero and heroine are based off two of my sweet friends at church, a young married couple. This was so much fun to write, my first official suspense story.
Stay tuned to what’s happening over here at Where Faith and Fiction Collide!
Once I finish a book, my husband gets to read it. He’s much more of a detail person than I am, so I have lots of corrections after that—but I’m grateful someone catches them before I send off the manuscript. It’s amazing how many typos, etc., that I don’t see.
I know! We have to step away and let others find those errors, don’t we. 🙂