Break out the champagne!!!

Wanted to share some news with everyone. The week has be a rather slow but satisfying work week for me, that is, until today.

All week I’ve been working on a third round of updates to my screenplay, Daddy’s Money. The work as been very satisfying and I crafted a new ending that I think is dynamite – the first two drafts ended without resolving things for two of the characters.

With that draft behind me, I had planned to set it down for a few weeks while I reworked the opening chapters of my fourth novel, Butterfly’s Child. My husband has been proofreading BC and complained loudly that it was WAY to slow in the opening chapters. So I sat down this morning with all the good intentions of seeing what I could do to speed up the action in Butterfly’s Child, when I checked my email and found the galley for my debut novel, Island Song.

Break out the champagne!!!

For you readers who are not published writers, a galley is a mockup of what the final published book will look like. Its purpose is to show me what the senior editor has changed, all the formatting, and allow me to proofread the work one last time before it goes to print. It is the final stage before I become a published writer.

It’s hard to explain what it feels like to read a novel that I finished over four years ago. I still know the story like the back of my hand, of course, but it reads new to me. I keep reading passages and being impressed with what I wrote. On the other hand, I also read passages and think: Oh shit, I should have said it another way. The galley, however, is not the place to make massive changes, only little edits.

The upshot is that I’m finally, after years of hard work and waiting, in the homestretch of being published. Can you hear the pop, the bubbles?

So for those of you who have been waiting, wondering if it would really happen, let me assure you, it won’t be long now. It should take me a week to crawl through and edit it, then send the edits to my publisher. How long it takes before it shows up on Amazon is anybody’s guess. I would think within two weeks.

The other news I received today was from my literary agent, Pema Browne. She sent me news that another publisher has turned down my third novel, Match Maker. The bad news is that two publisher, Saint Martins Press and Random House, have turned it down. The good news is that both had high praise for the writing, but felt the story line was too limiting (being a gay story) without enough universal appeal.
The other good news is that she hasn’t sent it to the publisher that I’m hoping to nab, Kensington. She mentioned she’ll try them next week when her contacts there are back from vacation. Cross your fingers for me.

Anyway, that’s my news. I’m glowing.