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Saturday, October 30, 2004

Big Saturday Plans

I should spend the day writing, but I made an appointment for a haircut. I need it desperately and heaven knows that if I don't get it done now, I probably won't have time later. And I figured since I was out anyway, I may as well swing by the mall and see if The Power of Two is on the shelf yet at my local Waldenbooks. If it is, I'll sign the copies on the shelf and see if the store wants some bookmarks. And I might buy a copy for myself and maybe one for my parents. You see, I don't have my author copies yet! I'm dying to see the book in it's finished form; I can hardly stand the suspense!

You see, it's such a long road to publication. I started writing the proposal for TPOT in May 2003. I sold the book in September of 2003 and began writing the entire story. I turned it in to the editor in January 2004 and did revisions in May of 2004. Then I had more revisions in June, although these were light and mostly small things. I went through my galleys, the test print of the book, in July and mailed them back. And I haven't seen anything since. So it's been 17 months since I first began the book and almost 14 months since I sold the story. That's kind of a long time and finally, finally I get to see the results of all the work I put into TPOT. The results of pouring my heart and soul into Jake and Cai and their story. It's a lot of my life invested in this and holding the actual book makes it seem so much more real.

So that's the plan for the day, see if I can track down a couple of copies of TPOT for myself. Oh, yeah, and try to write the next book too. I really need to do that. But something tells me, if I do find TPOT, I'll be reading it. Some authors don't read their finished product since there's nothing they can do about it. I understand that because I can pick up all kinds of things I would change if I could still make changes. No book is ever finished, it's just published. ;-) I'm one of the authors, though, who does like to reread and I think it's because I'm revisiting the characters.

You see, I live with my hero and heroine in my head for months. Jake and Cai stayed with me from May 2003 until August 2004, that's a long time. And when they left, as great as it was to get a couple of the voices out of my head, I missed them. We spent a lot of time together. I not only know about their lives before the book and during the book, I know some of what happens to them after the story closed. I know that Jake and Cai wait six years before having children. I know that their first is a little girl and she wrapped her daddy around her little finger right off. Jake is really cute with his daughter.

I couldn't wait to get rid of them in August. I had all these other characters in my head, and to be honest, I was tired of working on TPOT. But now that they've been gone for a while, I want to revisit them, so I read.