Things Just Got Real
My publisher just sent me a big stack of bound manuscripts of my upcoming novel. Here they are. These aren’t advanced reader copies, or ARCs, as they’re known in the industry, which are intended for reviewers so they can (hopefully) say wonderful things about your work to anyone who will listen. Bound manuscripts precede even that, and are to be used to obtain (again, hopefully) blurbs from well-known authors extolling the work.
Promotion is my least favorite part of this whole business because it’s hard to know if your hard work is paying off… but I’m a little more experienced now with this kind of thing, and I have a great deal of faith in this book. My God, but I’ve been working on it for a long time. The question is, how long? It’s hard to be sure. What stage do I count? Three of the principal characters have been trying to get me to tell stories about them for at least a quarter century, but those early efforts never reached the finish line. Fifteen years ago I completed multiple drafts of a first book, and even most of the draft of a second, that contained those characters, secondary characters that carried forward, and included many concepts I decided to keep.