hit tracker Dave Shields Author Blog: March 2005

A journal detailing my efforts to launch my career as a novelist. The goals are to share info about succeeding in this field with other aspiring authors, to provide updates to the many supporters who have asked me for them, and ultimately to build the momentum necessary to assure success in this venture.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

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.