I’m very excited to share that books two and three in the Bound Magic Series are now under contract with my publisher, Red Adept Publishing! The Trilogy is under way!
I couldn’t be more thrilled. Book two is drafted, edited, beta read and in the hands of the RAP editors now! I hope this means we’ll see the book by Summer 2020!
TO CELEBRATE, I’m giving away three copies of Book One to my newsletter readers, and several other fabulous prizes. Subscribe to my newsletter for your chance to win.
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Book three is also underway. I’m working on the first draft to get it all down on paper. There’s a lot of movement that happens during the first draft, as I agonize over pacing, plot, and the all important character growth that needs to happen from that first, gripping page to the series end. At some point I’ll call it garbage and have to take a mental break. But, I’ll rally and get through drafts two and three (probably also four and five) and then I will start begging friends, family and other authors to read it and tell me where it needs work. Cue the last round of edits… and off to the editor where the professionals get to rip it up and make it even better!
Once all that is done, we’ll get ourselves the final book in the series, and the omnibus edition. Wowsers. That’s a lot of work, and a high-quality book takes a year or more from start to finish!
(In case you’re interested in how the professional editing goes, here’s a little info on my experience from accepted submission to published book.)
I’ve written a lot about how to query your book and submit to agents or publishers, here, here and here. After the book is accepted by a publisher, I worked with multiple people to polish it up. These people were my new best friends. My favorite was the content editor, the fabulous Alyssa Hall from Red Adept Publishing! For the first time since I sat down to write a thing, (and it spiraled out of control into a real book), I had someone else to talk to who cared just as much as I did about the story.
Alyssa and I were fortunate enough to meet in person for her first hand-off of edits. We met in a little coffee shop in Central Square just outside Boston, where Fate Forged is set, and she gently delivered what is sometimes called the dreaded wall of red text. (Red text is the color that edits show in word documents, and typically there are a lot of edits). I actually didn’t find this part overwhelming. Honestly, I LOVED it. Not only had my editor provided reactions and thoughts inline in the manuscript, she provided me with pages and pages of thoughts on each chapter, the pacing, the story, and each main character. It was the best present I ever got!
I’m not going to say it was all fun and giggles, there was a lot of hard work after that. We went through three or four rounds of back-to-back edits. We cut a lot of things that didn’t work and added a few things that were missing. She forced me to clarify the magic and how it works, helped strip out a ton of repetitive phrases and words, and nudged me to work in more emotional reactions from my main character. I became a better writer for it. I spent week and weeks and weeks editing, it was hard and I didn’t love all of it, but I truly enjoyed it. A lot of it looked like this:
THEN, the book went to the line editor. OH MY GOOD-GOLLY. I had no idea the things I didn’t know. I feel like I completely rewrote the book in a different language…like a secret one that used a totally different part of my brain. But it wasn’t all spelling and grammar and punctuation, she was a fresh pair of eyes who caught some inconsistencies and asked more clarifying questions as well. This was pretty quick, and we spent maybe a month working together. Lastly, the manuscript–all polished and shiny–went through two proof readers. They looked at all the details, periods, commas and the all important typos and inconsistencies. This one resulted in a single email where I approved all the final tweaks.
FINALLY, Book One was ready to go after four rounds of editing! Each publisher is a little different, but it truly takes a village.
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