Happy Friday! 🌈
I have emerged, victorious, from my writing cave! (I told the members of my reader group on Tuesday that I have been dancing around my house to this song, non-stop, which I think is the perfect ‘training montage’ music for finishing a big ole book!)
As usual, no matter how tediously I schedule and plan out these drafts, I somehow end up writing 10,000 words or something on deadline day, which is exactly what I did! I squeezed it off to my beta readers just under the deadline, at, like, 11:55 pm. It’s about 102,000 words of steamy, second-chance yearning/angst but also fun action and adrenaline (eeep!). I currently believe it is the most gorgeous, beautiful and hot book I’ve ever written. I also hate it with the fire of a thousand suns! So this is right on schedule, feelings-wise.
My intrepid beta readers have it in their very skilled hands right now, so after another round of edits, polishing and more tweaks, it’s off to my line editor (more tweaks and polishing) and then a few copy-editors (tiniest of tweaks!) Just a very important reminder that when you’re holding a romance novel, you are holding a story that whole teams of people have gently nudged, shaped, scrapped and re-read to within an inch of its life. And its always worth it.
A rare shot of a romance author while in her writing cave, mere hours before her deadline.