Found some writing mojo

It's been a whole month since I blogged, and I have been busy with writing but not just the creative kind. Editing for publication is a serious business. What goes out has to be perfect, or at least, as close as you can get, so lots of blind corners, repetitions, awkward sentences and other mistakes have to go. The copy edit came back with lots of useful suggestions, thank goodness, sorting out the temporal problems.

I have a problem with numbers. A real problem with numbers, like I struggle to remember 4 digit numbers,and can't hold a 6 digit number in my head long enough to dial it. So keeping dates and days in my head as a story progresses - nightmare. Anyway, the copy editor not only found where I had made mistakes but suggested ways to get out of trouble. Then I worked on the manuscript for a couple of weeks and the book was gone through at the publisher's end. Finally, a whole load of typeset pages came my way courtesy of editorial assistant Emily - to be gone through one more time. Three pages of corrections later it is off, and finished.

This has released a flood of pent up story that just needed to be told. A Baby's Bones just cried out for a sequel, so in between mornings spent wrestling with Secrets 3 I have been writing ABB2. It's just steaming along at two or three thousand words most days. I've got 23,000 words in ten days, all of it historical. I've decided to try and write one whole story, then write the other strand as a separate story, a bit like I did with The Secrets of Life and Death. So satisfying to be writing original words again! I'm also writing linking chapters with book 3 - also very satisfying. This is what I want to do, write for a living, but the editing, rewriting and other writing related concerns do take up a lot of time. Meanwhile, the wait for a second book deal goes on... Just because you get one doesn't mean you'll ever get another one, a humbling thought.

We also got kittens...

Jasper

Ki

These are anti-cancer, anti-depressant kittens. I recommend them. maybe they are responsible for the writing mojo. Yeah, baby.