Three Chapters Down, Twenty-Four (?) To Go

I wish I had words of wisdom. Instead all I have is a 16oz. Red Bull and 22 pages of editorial notes. It. Is. Awesome. Entangled sent me the most detailed, helpful, and encouraging set of notes a writer could ever hope for. There were a lot of big suggestions made which will require a lot of work. I'm hoping to plow through a chapter a night and get a revised manuscript back to the great and awesome Tahra Seplowin in about a month.

Some chapters are being more or less COMPLETELY rewritten. Let me say this right now: nothing is harder than getting back into the swing of a book once you've already written, edited and revised it. I love my novel, I do, but it took almost three days to really get the feel of the characters and voice back like I used to know them. For so long all I did really was eat, breathe, and dream ZHUKOV! Getting that inner drive/obsession back took some work. Rereading the story start to finish, sifting through old idea journals I kept, and even a couple of character sketches helped get it all back home in my heart.

So now I'm powering through! I've done a major scene totally different after toying with one of the ideas Tahra offered up and I absolutely love the direction it ended up going in. I also am thrilled that she specifically asked for more scenes with Nik and Dr. Halliburton. Who loves twisted mind games and psychoanalysis? This girl, right here.

And now for something completely different:

If Your Fingers Are Crossed, Just How Are You Supposed To Type?

So things have been looking up. Cold queries I emailed out MONTHS ago finally started coming back with overwhelming responses. Two partials were upped to fulls and on top of those, one of my I sent out three months ago caught the eye of Entangled Publishing enough for them to request a rewrite and resubmit. I should be getting editorial notes back from Entangled by Saturday and I can't wait to get started.

Those are just cold query responses. I'm not sure what the proper term is for queries which you send out to agents you've never met, but my days of helping out in political campaigns have tricked me into wanting to call them cold queries. Someone smack my wrist if that's wrong.

Requested material I sent out to agents I met at the PNWA conference has slowly been coming back, too. It is all a waiting game. A very, very exhausting waiting game. I'm shamelessly excited about the five fulls I have floating around right now while remaining quietly giddy over the x or so number of partials. Fingers crossed...or maybe I should uncross them and type more.