I’m sure that’s the question you’re dying to ask about my telephone conversation with my editor at DAW, Sheila Gilbert, earlier today.
It went very well…it also went on for an hour and a half and produced five single-spaced pages of notes. I now have a couple of months to rewrite the whole thing and attempt to deal with some of the concerns and questions Sheila raised, all of which were very much to the point. The final manuscript I think will be at least 10,000 words longer–maybe more–based on what we talked about, but I’m told that’s OK: the goal here is to flesh out my created worlds and characters a bit more. I’ll be adding in some details I knew in the back of my head but never worked in, and creating quite a bit of new stuff I hadn’t thought about until Sheila asked me her questions.
My previous novel publishers have all been very small, and basically published what I sent them. Not a bad thing from a I-don’t-want-to-work-any-harder-than-I-have-to perspective, but not a good thing from a I-want-this-book-to-be-the-best-it-could-possibly-be perspective, which is a better perspective for a writer to have, I think. So I really appreciated Sheila’s inciteful questions and suggestions. It’s great to work with a editor in this way for a change.
A couple of other interesting details: the book is currently slotted for January 2008, and the cover artist will probably be Steve Stone again, who did the fabulous cover for Lost in Translation. That makes me happy! The first thing I have to do, in fact, is write some detailed descriptions of some of the story elements and suggest some scenes I think might make a good cover.
Oh, and the title…well, it’s still Marseguro for now. But if inspiration strikes…
1 comments
Congratulations! DAW, eh? I’m impressed. And getting input on the cover must feel really good too. I think I’ll lose the slipcover to my hardcover version of Lost in Translation. Which is unsigned. *sniff*