OMG...spoiler alert, there's going to be a baby!! Tara Hastings has just informed her husband Ewan that they are going to welcome their first child in the latter part of the next spring!! I won't tell you now if it's a boy or a girl. I won't tell you what happens. I just can't believe that Ewan married Tara and not Aria!! WHAT happened there? OMG...I am sooooooo shocked. (Not really, I mean, I wrote it so I know what happened.)
It's so much fun to sit here at the keyboard and think to myself "Do I want to say this" or "What should happen next?" What I think is really kind of funny is that I created a few too many characters some of which I didn't get a chance to use, so I'll have to backburner them and put them into the next book or the next one after that. I can change their years, clothes, looks, whatever I need to do. It's MY book!! I'm having too much fun with this one. I know it's about to end and that thought has me thinking about the filling out, the fluff and stuffing, and of course the tweaking. I so tweak. I can guarantee the tweak.
Before long, maybe by this time next week actually, I'll have finished the book in its entirety. I'll have managed to put all the chapters (should be 30) into one file. I'll then do a select-all command and change the font size to 14, give myself double spacing between lines, and I'll shore up the sides as well. I'll need to take out all the quoted conversations and/or dialogue and give them the proper formatting. I have to see what other books look like, then do it, because I was completely wrong in how I managed it in the past. I think both ways are technically acceptable, but I like to be consistent with formatting my books (now) with books that have been sold successfully in the past by other authors. This way I can say I know it's been formatted in a successful manner.
Once I canonize, double-space, justify and enlarge the font, I'll have about 400 or so pages to work with. I'll print it out (double-sided) and begin crossing out passages I hate, adding passages to replace the ones I hate, and adding fluff to the various paragraphs which will create a world of animation and/or vivid imagery for my readers. It's part of the writing process known as rewriting, and I do that very well. What I do is read a line, mark it, then look at my notes and decide which passage or phrase would sound good here or there, and I add it. I read it again, and I work it again. Once I'm happy with it, I scratch out that particular note so I know I used it. If I don't use it I circle it and come back to it. I've been making notes for years about what I want to say in a book. I have a fat book of notes I can use, to be honest with you. If you read the notes as a book it would resemble Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky for sure.
That's it. Chapters 22 and 23 are done, and tomorrow the Hastings will be just as pregnant as they are today, but things get dicey fast....an old flame of Ewan's reappears, and he is thrown for a mental and emotional loop not to mention what the discovery does to him physically! Oh...I may not be able to sleep tonight knowing our hero is about to become unraveled. (Spoiler alert: He'll survive)
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