Hello, gentle readers! Hope you are all well and staying safe!
Hope you all had a Happy Fourth of July weekend! My
respect, as always, to those who fought for freedom…and continue to fight for
that freedom to this day.
It’s early Sunday morning as I write this (and
already hot…but what do I expect living in Phoenix?). Apparently, we broke a
record recently (I think it was 118 degrees on Friday…not really the kind of
record I want to see broken). It’s all good though. I’ve been hibernating in my
house…in the air conditioning (yes, listening to the constant hum, praying it
will last the rest of this year).
So, what have I been doing while I’ve been
hibernating? I took advantage of the holiday and added a day of PTO so I’ve had
four days off from the day job (which is really nice but I’ll be paying for it
on Monday…and probably the rest of the week) and printed out Wife By Surprise.
You may remember that I finished writing the story in May, but I’ve been
letting it sit for a bit before I begin editing. That’s part of my process. That
space of time lets me look at the story with fresh —sorta—though I’m
always surprised when I read something I wrote and it’s particularly striking
and I wonder ‘who wrote that?'. The opposite is true as well. The dogs can
vouch for me when I frequently ask aloud, ‘who wrote this $&#$#*&$?’ as
I brutally cross it out with my red pen.
Yeah, sometimes there’s a lot of red on my pages
(I can be pretty ruthless with that red pen) but that’s all right. It’s part of
the whole writing thing. And it’s an opportunity to make the story better (and
find those too often repeated words and phrases), which is the whole point. I
read the entire thing out loud on Thursday (no, I had no voice left after that)
and made all my corrections on Friday (with the help of several very good
writing tools, books I cannot live without).
Now that all the corrections have been made (and I'm still happy with the results), I’m
ready to send it off to my beta readers, the next part of the process. And while
they are reading and making comments, I’ll continue working on The Marshal
and Mrs. Morgan, which is coming along pretty well.
Stay well! Stay safe! And remember to spread
kindness wherever you go!
Marie
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