About that time
Jun 9th, 2006 by Sandra
Well, it’ll be time soon for Dead Reckoning to hit the stands and I’m feeling some trepidation. It’s been well-reviewed — 4 stars from RT, 4.5 plugs from The Romance Readers Connection — but this book is my “baby” as it was the first one I wrote when I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing romance.
The history of poor Dead Reckoning involves seven full rewrites to make it a proper Silhouette Intimate Moments, and then another two full rewrites to contort it into a Bombshell. And while I learned huge amounts during that process, I’m still stuck with the fact that my ROI (Return On Investment) is going to be a negative number….
Ah well.
I ended up with a much better cover than I anticipated, the story flows pretty well, and I had fun working on it. That all counts for something, doesn’t it?
Well, I’m definitely looking forward to your next Bombshell as I really enjoyed The Orchid Hunter. And you’re right… that’s an awesome cover. The darkened sky, just hanging over page, will surely lend well to the tone and story of the book.
I was really pleased with several things.
First, I got to keep my title. It turned out there were some marketing reasons why they wanted the title to change, but I made a strong case for keeping it because I wrote much of the story around the nautical concept of dead reckoning. Then the Title Gods had mercy on me and I got to keep DR. Yay!
Second, during the dark days when I was having to come up with alternative titles, I had thrown in “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” which I knew was far, far too long but actually did kind of reflect some of the action. And my editor chose that for the cover blurb, which was really very nice.
Third, the cover is based on the very first scene of the book, which made hooking up the image to the blurb very handy indeed….
NINE TIMES? NINE TIMES???
::::THUD::::
I’m not feeling so bad now about the 3 revisions for my agent….
Mary, please keep in mind that those first seven rewrites were me learning to write a commercial novel. I wasn’t too bright about it when I first got started — I just kinda thought that I’d be able to instinctively write a sellable novel.
Silly me.
So I chased down rabbit trail after rabbit trail until I finally snapped to the fact that I needed to actually graph out some SIMs in order to figure out how they’re structured. Once I did that, everything fell into place….just in time to convert the whole shebang into a Bombshell.
:::::Sigh:::::
Three revisions for your agent sounds lovely, Mary. Best of luck to you!
Thanks for elaborating, Sandra! I REALLY loved The Orchid Hunter and I’m looking forward to Dead Reckoning!
S — do you realize that DR is Bombshell #100??? A double-milestone indeed!
Karm