editing

Milestone passed

This weekend I finished another round of revising, and sent the manuscript to the editor. It’s such a relief to have come this far! The manuscript is definitely getting better and better, though I’m starting to become really anxious about it turning into an actual book in a few months. A book people could actually read and have opinions about. Why do authors do this to themselves? There are so many conflicting feelings right now, and always. I was nervous about publishing Entertaining the Sombrevilles as well, of course, but this is on another level. At the same time I’m so excited about the book being out there soon. I keep visualizing a few copies of it on my bookshelf, and it’s a lovely image.

For the next few weeks I’ll be busy with research for book #2, until I get feedback from the editor. I have lots and lots of BBC documentaries to watch as part of the research – life could be much worse. I very much recommend A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley!

End of the year

… and what a year it’s been. Lots of bad things happening in the world, but for me personally 2017 has been a really good year. I got my very first novel published – yay! And on top of that I wrote the first drafts of two other novels, one of which will be published this spring. 2017 was the year when I finally became an author for real, after spending years and years struggling and angsting and trying to find out what I wanted to do, creatively speaking.

I’ve always thought that authors exaggerated when they talked about spending 5+ years on a novel or writing several versions of a story, hundreds of thousands of words that they didn’t even use in the end. And if I’d known, back in 2014 when I thought I had written a finished novel, that I’d end up scrapping all of it and starting over… I would have gone crazy. It just takes so, so much effort to finish a project like this, and I needed all those years and all those words. To practice, to find out what I wanted to do.

Just a few years ago, I didn’t think I was able to write novel-length stories. I could do short stories, but that was it. Editing was a mystery to me, and research as well. I still love writing short stories, but I’ve come to realize that novels are even better. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through another first draft in 2018, or if I’ll have to focus on editing only, but I do hope it won’t be too long until I can start working on my next novel. Because there’s nothing better than the intense experience of writing a story for the very first time.

I’ll be finishing my current round of editing today, hopefully—after that, I’ll take a break from writing until January, and spend time with family, books and movies instead. Unless I write that Christmas short story that I can’t get out of my head…

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Copy edits

I’ve just reviewed the copy edits for Entertaining the Sombrevilles. The book will be published in less than a month. It still feels surreal that it will be out there, for anyone to read. I don’t think I’ll fully understand that until it’s actually happening, to be honest. But for now I’m just happy that it’s so much cleaner and in every way better, now after the copy editing. Thank God that there are other people helping me out with the manuscript. I’m so grateful for that.

Currently

So, it might be time for an update. I haven’t blogged in forever because I wanted to focus on my fiction-writing, and fiction-writing takes time. So much time. It’s been going pretty good, though, and I’m about to start planning the second book in my pirate series. But there is even more exciting stuff happening, that I haven’t shared with you yet:

Entertaining the Sombrevilles is going to be published! It will be out on Less Than Three Press and I’m currently working on the final edits. I’m really happy to be working with LT3 and I hope the book will turn out well. I’ll be posting more details as soon as I can.

I also got myself a twitter account. I haven’t quite grasped how twitter works yet but if you want to follow me on there, I’m elvirabell_.

By any other name

Right now, I’m thinking about creating a pen name for when I’m writing erotica. I’ve been a bit indecisive about publishing those stories, but a good friend of mine told me she really thought I should, and I do want to get the stories out there – just having them on my computer feels incomplete somehow. I haven’t done any editing at all so far, and there are lots of things to be done with each story. But hopefully I’ll have something to self-pub in the end – I’ll keep you posted.