I. FINISHED. THE. BOOK.
I got on a writing roll the Saturday before Labor Day and did not stop until I finished midweek last week. I wrote like a crazy person. (Which I am, but that’s another blog.) I revised both storylines until the tension was white-hot in each one and the knife was buried up to the hilt in my insides with not being sure what the characters were going to do next. But as all stories do, they ended and my eighth revision of Hurricane Baby is in the books.
And I decided I had enough. I ran it through spell-and-grammar-check a few more times as I refined certain passages and finally found a search-and-replace that fixed the worst of the mistakes I had introduced accidentally. I bit the bullet on some things that my reader said needed to be changed that I had resisted changing when I was rewriting new passages, but I finally broke down and took out some dialogue tags that had been near and dear to my heart. I searched for words that were used too often and found replacements.
And now I am going to start sending it out to small publishers and university presses. I’m entering three contests for short-story collections and sending to someone who already published a novella of mine just for a try to market it as a novel-in-stories. And I picked out two others to send to because they are known to be open to Southern writing. So that’s six so far. Then I will wait and send to others if none of those work out.
It’s an exhilarating feeling to be done with this round. I’m certain that anyone who is interested in publishing it will require more. Because perfection is not of this world. But I think I have taken it pretty far and done some pretty honest work in telling these stories I have carried around in my head and on my hard drive for far too long. (I also finally saved it into the cloud!) That’s all I meant to do–tell some honest stories.
So now we wait. I hope I can have some good news in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you posted!
Julie Liddell Whitehead 