Sunday, October 02, 2011

Grant year, week 39: 2nd draft finished!

Well, kinda. I think it was Trent Jamieson who said that the rewriting is finished when you run out of time. So, I think I would like to rewrite the epilogue, if I have time.

I've been really slack with my updates on the blog. Apologies for that. The reality is that there hasn't been a hell of a lot of news. I've been slowly plodding along with what I'm calling my 'continuity sweep' of the second draft. I rearranged so much, structurally, that I needed to go back and make sure that it all made sense.

And it did, pretty much. There's one thing that's niggling me, so I think that means that it's still not quite right. But I feel like if I had to send it off to the Hachette thing tomorrow, I'd feel okay about it. And I'll only have to send it off to the Hachette thing if I get shortlisted. Which, obviously, I hope will happen.

So, from here. I'll probably give myself a night off tomorrow. (I'll most likely still be writing, but just not working on Skin Deep). I've had some ideas for the follow-up book. One of which, bizarrely enough, came from my daughter. She said that she'd seen mandarin skin on the nature strip outside the house. She said maybe it's a burgular.

It got me thinking about a guy who's under some kind of magic spell and the mandarin is some sort of hypnotic prompt. He's out there, watching, quietly eating his mandarin. I don't know. If Skin Deep is anything to go by, by the time it reaches the book, it will bear no resemblance!

Anyway, next steps are to send the second draft to a couple of people who have offered to be early beta readers (if there is such a thing) and also the editor, who has kindly agreed to have another look.

And then hopefully, if I can iron out this final problem, it will just be a text edit and it will be good to go to the second round of beta readers.

Woohoo!

Posted via email from garykemble's posterous

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