Signed, sealed, delivered!

I've been pushing very, very hard for the last several months to get my sequel to The Race ready for my agent. It has been a challenging process and I stretched myself so thin that I came down with pneumonia. I mailed the manuscript off yesterday, and spent a good part of today in bed.

You may have heard before that writing is really about re-writing. That certainly was the case with this book. My first round of critiquers gave me brutally honest feedback, and it wasn't good. I'd failed to communicate the ideas I meant to, and their comments helped me to figure out where I'd gone wrong. Unfortunately, the deadlines for getting the book to my agent didn't change, so that meant I had to do a lot of work in only a little time.

The great news is that critiquers who have read the new manuscript have given it rave reviews. I can't express how satisfying it has been to see the opinions of this story transform. It's fascinating to see the effect that small adjustments can have on a reader's overall impression of a story. Hopefully my agent will react to the novel as positively as recent readers, then we can make some final adjustments and find a publisher who wants to buy a revolutionary blockbuster.