December January Roundup

What a busy couple of months it has been! December and January are two of my favourite months of the year – it’s Christmas, summer, daylight savings, beach days, pub days, work/office closures, New Year then my birthday all rolled into a super-busy couple of weeks. I always love to set this time aside for just relaxing and having fun with friends and family, but unfortunately that means not a lot of writing work gets done! That being said, I have managed to kick a few goals in the last two months, so here is what’s been happening in my writing world:

Book Updates:

Laura the Explorer

I mentioned in my November Roundup that I was going to be making some stylistic changes to the manuscript in response to my editor’s feedback. What that actually meant was that I agreed to change the book from being written in first person present tense to first person past tense.

Oh. My. God.

Let’s just say, I never want to change a book’s tense again! It wasn’t hard so much as just completely time consuming. Line by line. Sentence by sentence. Word by word. I was getting up early so I could sit and do an hour’s editing before going to work each day. And slowly – so slowly – I chipped away at it until the whole manuscript had been rewritten. (This is what I did for most of December and the first half of January.)

Looking at the book now, I completely agree with the brilliant editor’s at Pantera Press in that the book works so much better in past tense. And now that the edits are complete, and I’ve sent the manuscript back to them, something super exciting is going to happen….

Its going to an acquisitions meeting.

Really. Actually. After almost two years of revisions and rewrites, the book is finally moving forward to that next stage. And I know this still doesn’t mean anything solid. I know that the majority of books that go to an acquisitions meeting don’t make it across the line. But I’m definitely going to be crossing my fingers and toes for the next month while I wait to hear the outcome.

Kalileia

I’ve done another short edit/cleanup on this manuscript and today I posted it down to Melbourne as a submission to the 2018 TEXT Prize! I’m not expecting anything to come of this at all – while I love the book myself, there are so many amazing writers in Australia & New Zealand that I’m sure the book will be up against. But having said that, I hope the people at TEXT fall in love with the story as much as I have, and who knows – maybe it will be exactly what they are looking for this year. One of the good things about this prize is that the winners are announced in May, so I don’t need the manuscript out of action for too long before I can start making other plans for it.

Kalileia Book 2 & New Project

No further news on these two projects, though I’m planning on spending the next couple of months doing some heavy-duty plot planning on the New Project. One thing I have realised and learned from writing three manuscripts to date, is that while I seem to be great at writing beginnings and mid sections (acts 1 and 2) I tend to struggle with pulling things all together and delivering a fantastic ending (act 3). So with that in mind, I’m determined to do some really strong, thorough planning on the New Project and make sure I have a kick-ass ending lined up before I write myself into a plot-hole.

I mentioned in my November Roundup that I have something big coming up in March, and I’m also spending all my free time in February at my regular job so from now until April most of my writing energy will be dedicated to idea-making and plot-planning.