The second revisions of the latest Romance line book are with my editor after a couple of long days and late nights.
I have thrown myself deep into the world of the characters and made them suffer on the way to love.
Fingers crossed my editor will think the same.
After a delicious lie in this morning [ sleep depravation ] I have a huge in-tray of paper and virtual stuff to catch up with, and the floor of the garden cabin need to be sanded, vaccumed and varnished, and maybe, just maybe, if the sun shines, I can sit and read for an hour.
My fellow Romance Line author Nicola Marsh has blogged about the mysterious ‘Limbo Land’ which for contracted writers is that period of time when your latest book or story proposal has been submitted and you are waiting for feedback from your edtor or literary agent. And waiting.
You take time to smell the roses and catch up on your sleep and refill the creative well that makes you who you are.
And it is bliss to simply potter in the garden where the daffodils have emerged and read books when you feel like it. Sigh.
But there comes a time when all the socks have been ironed and there is a fresh new box file with a blank label on the side all perky and ready to be used.
Looking forward to that.
It does make wonder about the process other authors use. Here is a brilliant link to a collection of anecdotes about the tricks and patterns and working methods of creative folks old and new: http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/
For example; Isaac Asimov
His usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M.
In “In Memory Yet Green,” the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1979, he explained how he became a compulsive writer. His Russian-born father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that were open from 6 A.M. to 1 A.M. seven days a week. Young Isaac got up at 6 o’clock every morning to deliver papers and rushed home from school to help out in the store every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, Yiddish for sluggard. Even more than 50 years later, he wrote: “It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I’m not a folyack.”
The New York Times, April 7, 1992