Down To The Wire: The End of the Book

I’m on the last mile, the last gasp. Somewhere, ahead, is the buried treasure and I’ve got to get there and rescue it by deadline or I’m in trouble. Along the way, I’m fighting off the Maleficent Seven—Exhaustion, Temptation, Backache, Eyestrain, Tendonitis, Sleep-Deprivation, and Self-doubt. Yep, we’re meeting at the corral, and it’s either me…or them.

So yes, once again I’m down to the wire with a book. No matter how much time I have, I seem to fill it with the current project. Although to be fair to myself, this was the first book in a new series and they always take longer—in my opinion—because of the worldbuilding and finding the new characters’ voices and so forth. Especially when you’re an organic writer and you don’t really follow an outline or much of a synopsis.

I’m at the end, though, of Night Myst, the first Indigo Court book, and am just finishing up final revisions before I send it to my editor. At this point, sleep becomes moot, my mind is totally filled with the book, and I'm going through looking for everything that could jar the reader out of the world. I'm fine-tuning, editing, revising, nitpicking...making sure the damned thing works, and I'm working a good 14-16 hours a day on it.

And I’m proud of it so far—it’s what I wanted it to be, though not what I expected it to be. How’s that possible? Because I go in with a mood in mind, a vision of a painting or scene and the basic knowledge of the main characters, and I try to create that mood, the ‘feeling’ that the idea tackled me with. And even though along the way all sorts of characters join the dance, and events happen that I never planned to happen, if I come out with a story that’s solid and strong and where the mood resonates with my initial vision, then I know I’ve done my job.

Each book I write has a playlist and that begins before I even put one word on the page. The playlist is usually long, and built around the mood I was talking about, and it too, evolves, through the writing of the book. Songs are deleted, songs are added, one or two songs will come through as the theme songs for the book. You can find the playlist for every book that I’ve written since Witchling on my website, by the way, under the individual book’s description. Before Witchling, I didn’t write much to music—I wasn’t writing in a genre in which I was all that comfortable with and couldn’t focus on music and the work too. But over the past few years, that’s all changed.

For Night Myst, the three main ‘theme’ songs became:

• Half Light by Low and tomanandy (the main song from the Mothman Prophecies, a freaky-assed movie I saw that has a similar mood to what I wanted to evoke from the book)
• The Angel Wars by Gary Numan (my fave singer of all time…sigh….)
• Social Enemies by Orgy

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY-LaFHAfQc if you can't see the video).

When I get to this point in the book, I want it done. All done. And yet, I inevitably begin to cry when I’m finished and press that ‘send’ button and ship off the manuscript to my editor. It’s like opening the door and kicking your baby out into the wide, big world and you pray that you’ve given it all that it needs to not only survive, but thrive.

And since I make it a rule to write clean, I want my editor to call me after she’s read it and say, “Great job! I love it!” This happens each time, each time revisions are few, but it’s because I’ve worked my butt off to make sure that I write tight, that everything is consistent, that I’ve caught as many of the potential gaffes as possible.

And then, I play for a little bit. Because facing the Maleficent Seven isn’t easy, and by the end I feel a little like a punching bag. My back hurts, my arms ache, I have the concentration of an ADD kitten on espresso, I want pampered, I’m lonely for my characters and missing them already (which goes away the moment I start the next book on the other series), and I desperately want to get out of my head—take me away, anywhere but where I have to make decisions that can shatter worlds and lives. At this point, I just want to spend my time watching movies, gaming, eating chocolate and comfort food, dragging my husband into the bedroom--all activities where I can feel but not have to really think.

So yes, I’m almost to the end of revisions on Night Myst, book one of the Indigo Court Series, and I’m going to be desperately frantic till my editor reads it and tells me I didn’t miss the mark. And I’m going to play hard until, about 7-10 days from now I suddenly realize the voices in my head are speaking loud and clear, and there’s a new deadline on the calendar, and it’s time to dive back into the sisters’ world and begin Harvest Hunting, the 8th OW book--Delilah’s new adventure…and then, once again, I’ll immerse myself in words and worlds, and I’ll make lives and shatter lives, and lose myself in a different reality for another few months.

Yasmine