So, I have this story that I fondly (and not so fondly most of the time) call “the dicking around” story and what I mean by that is I wrote it in 2009 and have never submitted it anywhere because I couldn’t get it like I wanted it. I even used it as the guinea pig book for an on-line class I took but still was unhappy with it. The heroine seemed whiny and it was a slow-starter. I put it aside about three times in a year and moved on to other stuff.
Whenever I’d have a lull in my work, I’d drag that puppy out and try to “fix” it. I printed it and edited it that way, then I combined chapters two and three and wove them into chapter one and still wasn’t happy. I put it aside again. I dragged it out yet again in June and printed it. I marked all over it and still wasn’t happy.
Then again in September, I pulled that sucker out and worked on it until I decided it was an “under the bed” book because it still seemed to be a book that got interesting too late to hook anyone into the story.
Lo and behold, last week, I had an inspiration. I’d cut out the first two pages where my heroine was at work and talking to her boss about it being three o’clock and having missed lunch and start the story where she walks out of the tube station in London and falls down. When I did that, I went a bit further and fixed the stuff that the lose of the first couple of pages required. All this tinkering was in the first chapter because, like I said, I thought the rest was acceptable once the reader got past that first part and by now, my girl’s whining had stopped.
Before I could over-think it, I took an old synopsis and shortened it to the publisher’s specifications, then attached the manuscript and synopsis to an email and, with a cringe, I pushed “send”- no turning back now. If they hated it, bed time for it. If they wanted to publish it, so be it. Heck, it only took three years to push that button, so what did I have to lose, right?
Well, this morning I got the news. Doctor, Lover, Baronet will be published by BookStrand in January 2013 as an e-book and June 2013 in paper. So, if you too have a “dicking around” story, polish that thing til you’re okay with it crawling out from the primordial ooze of your bed and send it out in the world like I did. What have you got to lose? And you might even save your sanity.
Jillian Chantal 