Editing, Editing, Editing.

I know I’m a day late on my usual blog post, but I had a good reason. Well, I think it was a good reason, though some might point to my perfectionism as a bit of an issue.

I was finishing editing Drawn Into Love. But wait, you say, you finished that ages ago! You already paid an editor to look at it. You had Beta readers. Haven’t you been submitting that to agents for like two years? Well, okay. All fair points.

But the fact remained that I wasn’t satisfied with it in its current state. That every time I submitted it I felt apologetic and, while I went through it awhile ago to justify every scene (as you might remember), I still had qualms. So, I decided to go through it one more time. At first it was just going to be a super quick, one-week thing to fix a few discrepancies I found during my last read-through, but it quickly turned into a light rewrite.

You know why? Because apparently, somewhere in the last two years, I learned a lot more about writing, and when I was skimming the pages and read things like “Josie looked away, embarrassed”, I promptly looked away, embarrassed. Yup, sentences like that just had to be fixed. So what was supposed to take a week took a month, but guess what? I love my book again.

It is a sweet escape story of romance and learning to let others help carry your burdens. Of finding a way through life. Of happily ever afters even in hard times. And I finally feel like it is a story I can stand behind while querying.

Of course, querying is a whole other issue. You know that whole saying that there are thousands of agents and you have to go through at least a hundred before you find one interested? Well, turns out that when it comes down to it, there aren’t that many agents in there. First, narrow it down to a Christian agent market. Then to romance. Then to agents who are still accepting submissions. After hours of research, I was able to find nine. Yup. Nine who accepted Christian romance and weren’t closed. So, I’m not holding my breath.

Then again, I believe God has a purpose for this book–people it will mean something to, people who need to read it–so I trust that, eventually, it will be published in the format that those people need, even if it is something I don’t expect or can’t see right now. Then again, maybe His purpose was simply to make me a better writer and it will never see the light of day. If so, I’ll still take it because when it comes down to it, I want God’s plan for me. Not my own.