Nicole R Murphy
on Saturday, February 6, 2010 1:40 AM
I decided to take a break from writing for a week after the stress of doing the copyedits for book one and submitting book two within the space of a month. It’s been a good move – last night, I started to get inspired for book three. I went to sleep with the vision of a pivotal scene in my mind and I’m looking forward to writing it. Without giving too much away, I’m going to force my heroine to face her darkest fears and make the choice between doing something that fills her with bone-freezing dread, or saving the man she loves. My hope – the readers will also love him so much that they’ll be screaming blue murder at her to say yes. I know what the answer will be – but I’m not going to say :)
Getting re-enthused for book three has been helped by the moves taking place at the publishing level. After a lot of angsting and back and froing, the trilogy and book one now have new titles and these are the ones that will stick. The trilogy will be called The Dream of Asarlai (Asarlai is the antagonist of the whole trilogy) and book one is called The Secret Ones, which I think is a seriously cool title. These came together quite quickly because of another deadline – the book needed to go to the printers so that the advanced reader copies could be put together to send to reviewers and bookstores in the hope of getting the buzz going.
So it could well be that right now, somewhere in Sydney, there are boxes and in those boxes are my book! Okay, it doesn’t have the proper cover and it’s been created out of the uncorrected proofs but still, there it is – my novel exists in book form. Happy dance time!
At the moment, I’m looking at starting work on book three on Monday and my plan is to have it done by my birthday in early March. It should be doable – I’d done 80,000 words of it before the copyedits arrived, and while there are changes I need to make to it because of changes to the the first book, I can’t see why I can’t get the re-write finished by around March 10. Then I’ll leave it a couple of weeks before revising it and hopefully getting it to my readers at the end of April. Their feedback should be with me at the end of May, and I then have all of June to get it polished and up to speed to be delivered July 1.
Of course, I’ll have proofing of book one, structural edits and possibly copyedits of book two and I’ll have to start work on the publicity side of things for the July launch of The Secret Ones…