Success!

Dear Reader,

Wonderful news today, my first novel Time of Death has found a home! On January 19th I received word from Five Star Publishing that they would be purchasing my manuscript.

Writing is a funny business. You spend your time laboring away over the keyboard – pounding away at the keys and burning up synapses to create what you believe is a great story, you edit heartily to prune everything up into a presentable shape, and then you send your work off firmly believing you will be rejected. In no other business is the performer so convinced that all their efforts will come to naught. Yet we keep going.

Perhaps being a writer is a form of insanity – it’s worth considering. Unfortunately, as soon as you’ve come to the decision that you’re crazy you sell a piece and the whole cycle of insanity is revived.

Now I wait for contact from the publisher. Probably an editor who will help me with further pruning and shaping – it’s the hard part of the job, the part that isn’t fun. In the end, though, what comes out will be tighter, better written, and more pleasurable to read. I once attended a writer’s conference where Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. She said something at that conference that has stuck with me, “If you sell a novel you’ll start editing – by the time you finish editing you will hate your novel.”

I hope I don’t wind up hating it – I put a lot of work into it to hate what I created!