Six Train Wins an Award and Reckonings Editorial Process is Underway

NIEAseal-2014-Winner-XL

 

 

The Six Train to Wisconsin won the National Indie Excellence Awards cross genre fiction category!!!

Finaling in a a contest is a great achievement, but it’s really really cool to win one too.

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On May 8th, I got my editorial letter on Reckonings. It took me 2 days to process it. No matter how right feedback is, it’s never ever easy to hear. At least for me.

So there’s ranting and raving and fear that I cannot ever accomplish any of this.

I verbalize every emotion as it pops up. Emails get fired off to my closest friends. But this is normal for me. It’s how I deal with feedback. Privately and with a rainbow of emotion.

My crit partner gets a copy of the letter and helps me process it. She actually reads it and talks or texts me through it. Thank you so much Kat Bender!

After years of feedback, I know how I’ll react and I know eventually it will all be okay. But those first two days are rough.

No one wants to hear everything that is wrong with their book. Even if they absolutely need to in order to make it better.

By day two, I’d fired off follow up questions and started brainstorming ways to address the editor’s concerns. She’s awesome. Make no mistake, the feedback is great. It’s just painful to recognize that and dig in.

Within a few days (it was Mother’s Day weekend), she answered all my questions. I had made peace with all the warts in the manuscript and was itching to extract them. I was in a good place to begin.

So it’s been about 10 days of hard core revisions. The entire beginning was torn apart (think first 100 pages).

It’s a rough draft now. I promised her the first 100 pages in 3 weeks in a decent draft though, so I’m pushing through the manuscript in 1 pass now so that all the changes at the end ripple through the beginning and vice versa. Then I’m circling back to those 100 pages for a week.

I have about 6 weeks left to get this all done. I’m writing 8-10 hours a day 6.5 days a week.

So if I am not commenting as much on your blog or not on Twitter or FB as much as I usually am, this is why.

I will still be checking in here and responding to all blog comments.

But the writing has to come first. Especially when I am on deadline. And not a self-imposed deadline, but a contractual deadline. 🙂

 

 

 

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