A bittersweet day for me today. Late last night I emailed the ‘final’ ENCHANTRESS manuscript to my editor at Plume/Penguin. I say ‘final’ with quotes because, assuming my publisher accepts it, there will still be more edits in the works. Some, hopefully not too many, for content by my editor, followed by an embarrassing number of fixes by the copy editor. That’s when I find out that spell-check doesn’t find nearly all the errors I would hope.
But this is the start of saying good-bye to Rav Hisda’s daughter and all her associates. Her tale is told. My contract with Plume is for two volumes and I’ve done them.
The URJ Biennial was fantastic and exhausting, and once January arrives and I’ve sent the final ENCHANTRESS ms to my publishers at Plume, I’ll blog more about it. For a taste, check out the videos; I especially recommend the Friday Night Song Session, where if you look carefully, you can glimpse me dancing in a long line of exuberant Shabbat celebrants. I’m wearing a red top and brown skirt.
Back to my editing saga. It took me several weeks just to go over my daughter’s edits to Part 1; like Volume 1 – APPRENTICE, Volume 2 is also divided into parts. As I mentioned before, editing my first, rough, draft also involves setting each scene, embellishing the dialogue with beats and more descriptive terms than ‘said.’ Once this was accomplished, I sent the new second draft of Pt 1 to my freelance editor and turned my attention to revising Pt 2. At this point I’d managed to whittle Part 1 down to 75,000 words, but Part 2 was close to 90,000. Clearly I had my work cut out for me.
I’d expected have Part 2 to my editor much sooner, but as you know, life intervened and I lost a few weeks when my retina detached in late October and I needed emergency eye surgery. When she started on other projects in the interim, I was left with more time to work on Pt 2 until she was ready for it. Thankfully my publishers had already pushed the pub date for ENCHANTRESS to Sept 30, two months later than RASHI’S DAUGHTERS same out. So they were able to allow me more time to finish the ms in light of my eye problems – for which I am very grateful.
So beyond the kind of fixes I did on Pt 1, the second draft of Pt 2 also included many recommended by my favorite editing aid, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King. Thus my editor had much less to fix in Pt 2 than in Pt 1.
A quick post on my editing process before I head down to San Diego for the URJ Biennial. Once I had my daughter’s critique I started over at Chapter 1. This, of course, is the crucial chapter, because readers won’t go any further if they aren’t hooked at the beginning. ENCHANTRESS starts off a few months after APPRENTICE ended, with my hero and heroine unexpectedly meeting on a boat to Pumbedita, the city where they’ll be living and studying. Book 1 ended with a misunderstanding [to put it mildly] between them.
A sticky widget is that I can’t assume readers have read the previous volume, or like my daughter, they read it but don’t remember all that happened. So I have to fill in the important information they missed without boring those who already know it. I not only have to provide most of this in the first few chapters, but do it in a fashion that doesn’t slow down the forward action of the plot. Thankfully my heroine is studying with a new sorcery teacher who doesn’t know a lot of her history, which gives me plenty of opportunities for my heroine to talk about herself to bring the teacher up to date.
My daughter is a big fan of the romance and magic parts of my novels, but less so [to put it mildly] of the history and Talmud. I have to take it with a grain of salt when she criticizes those passages, but I know I’ve done a good job if she likes one.
I hope you had a wonderful Hanukah. It is strange to have Hanukah finished and we’ve barely started the first week of December. Frankly, my best present was getting my website back up and fully functional. In case you hadn’t noticed, my server went down under attack back in September and had so much trouble trying to recover all the pages that we ended up switching to a new host. What an aggravation – loosing all emails sent to author@rashisdaughters.com, having no access to my web schedule just as I was leaving on a 3-week book tour, and never knowing if a particular link was going to work. It appears to be all better now, but what a wakeup call about how dependent I am on all this e-technology.
And just in time, too. I’m excited to share that I’ll be speaking at the Union for Reform Judaism’s biennial convention next week in San Diego. I am honored to be on a panel along with Jewish historical novelists Anita Diamant and Zoe Klein. According to the URJ website, we will share our inspiration and insights, reflecting on our Jewish journeys and how our faith has influenced our writing. I expect us to talk about much more than that. I still can’t get over that not only will I be on the same stage as Anita Diamant, but that our session sold out over 2 weeks ago.
This is a huge networking opportunity for me, as approximately 5000 Reform Jewish machors attend, all of whom I wish would invite me to speak at their synagogues. I’ll have time to meet many of them at the convention bookstore, where I’ll be signing copies of my books along with other authors in attendance. I expect I’ll be hanging out in the lobby and vendor area as well, which I hear are the best places to network.