Twelve weeks today

What are they doing? Why haven't they all rejected my manuscript (Secrets/Borrowed Time) with a nice 'no thank you', or said they liked it? I'm confused. It's starting to get me down, especially as I'm in the 'Oh God, how the hell do I slap Baby's Bones into shape?' stage of editing. It's all rather depressing.

So, I've started the next book. I promised myself they would have deliberated and judged the first book by the time I finished the second, which with hindsight is probably why I finished the second book so fast! Maybe it's the third book...on the plus side, this is a book that's been incubating in my imagination for a long time, so I will actually have a novel plan, like a real, grown up writer! One unexpected complication: I wrote a character sketch of one of my two bad guys - not that anyone is entirely bad - and found I'd based one of them on my brother. I have two, one a health care professional, very family orientated, and one a builder, also very family orientated. I found the bad guy was so much like one of them, I had to dial back considerably and reinvent him to be more like a real psychopath I saw interviewed on the telly. Unconsciously, we do use the people we know as characters, or at least bits of them. I'm trying not to use real people but they creep in. Does everyone do that?  

I'm also waiting to hear what my tutor has to say about the rationale I wrote last week, which was so hard to commit to. I found the process of thinking about what I did and why was a challenge, though I did learn a lot about the process along the way. Useful exercise, but I'm not sure I want it marked. It would be like opening the blog up to be marked by some unknown criteria.