I’ve just sent the page proofs for Shadow Kin back to my editor. Which means, at least as far as writing it goes, my work on Shadow Kin is finally done. It’s as good as I can make it and apart from doing my bit to make sure people know about it and can find it when it comes out, there’s nothing more I can do, as much as my writer’s brain might like to keep tweaking it.
It’s kind of an odd feeling. Books live in your head for a long time (some longer than others). I got the idea for Shadow Kin way back sometime around June/July 2008 just before I went to RWA in San Francisco (hmmm, that’s neatly circular given I’m about to leave for RWA in New York in six days). I wrote maybe fifty or sixty pages of it then but then had to put it away while I worked on other things. I picked it up again seriously sometime in mid? (or perhaps a bit earlier) 2009. I sent it to Miriam on 5 December 2009 according to my emails. Roc bought it in February 2010 and today it’s finally done, even though I’m still carrying that world around in my head as I work on the rest of the series. My first book is about to go out into the world where it will belong to the readers who read it as much as it belongs to me. It will sit in their heads in a different way, through their eyes and experiences and their take on the story, which will all be different to mine. That’s the most intriguing thing about stories…they’re slightly (or vastly) different for everyone who reads them. A kind of telepathy where I take this big shiny thing in my head, get whatever I can of it down on paper so that someone else can read those words and take it into their heads and wrap it up with everything that makes them themselves and see what they make of it from there.
Some will see what I saw (or close enough to it), some will see very different things. Some will like what they see, some may even love it. Some will definitely hate it or not see the shiny thing at all and be “meh” about it. And there’s nothing I can do about any of that. What will be, from this point in, will be. I have to just let it go and focus on the books I can still do something about…the ones I’m writing now. Which is another part of the process of taking the step from being unpublished to published. Letting go, moving on and trying to make the next book even better.
I wonder what the next idea to take up head space is going to be? And how long I’ll carry that one around?
Congratulations!! You have sent your baby out of the nest to fly.
Wow just saw the cover on the newsletter. GORGEOUS!!! Congratulations. I look forward to reading you work.
Thanks, Mary, it does feel a bit like being a mama bird tipping the baby off the edge : )
And Shannon, yay, the newsletter works. I’m still in love with my cover….Roc are going to have to do something brilliant to outdo themselves for Book 2!