I’m writing a new book. I’m almost at the end of a first draft and already looking forward to the revision process. No, really. I have a lot of ideas for what I need to add to the draft to bring it closer to my original vision for the project.
Still, I’m in an odd place. For many years—more than a decade—I had a finished book that I was submitting to agents or publishers, or I was promoting a book that had just been published. I was almost never “between” books, like I am now.
When my first book came out in 2009, my second book was already finished and in the hands of my agent. When that book came out, I was looking for a new agent for my third book, which was done. It took a while to get an agent for it, and then it took a few years to find a publisher. By the time it was published, I had contracts for books four and five and was working to edit those manuscripts to prepare them for publication. The fourth book came out in 2020 and the fifth in 2021, and by then I was very close to being done with book six. I signed a contract for that one in 2023 and it came out in 2024.
At that point, I barely even had an idea for a new project. The seed for it had been planted during a trip to Europe in the fall of 2022, but it hadn’t quite germinated yet. In 2024, while I was promoting my sixth book (The Last Bird of Paradise), I toyed with some ideas on the page, but it wasn’t really going anywhere.
What got me going, finally, was being invited to join a critique group. We are a group of six writers, all published by the same publisher, and we meet weekly to discuss our work. The feedback I’ve received from these writers on my work-in-progress has been very helpful, but even more valuable has been being held accountable. I have to produce pages to share with the group every other week, and so I do. Which is how I’ve managed, finally, to get near the end of a first draft.
To learn more about my books and find links for ordering them, please visit the Books page on my website.
