Oh my, how you’ve grown!

That post title refers to the length of my novel An Illusion of Trust. My target goal of 80,000 words may seem conservative to some of you, but at the time I set it, I’d struggled to get the first 60,000 down. But after I got feedback from my alpha reader, the words started flowing. With additional input from beta readers the book grew more. The manuscript that’s with my copy editor now stands at almost 92,000 words, which is 4,000 more than its prequel, The Brevity of Roses.

Speaking of editing, I’ve mentioned before that one of the ways I edit is by reading my manuscript on my Kindle. But because I had the old-style button keyboard model I didn’t actually do mark-up on the Kindle. Not so this time around. One of the Christmas presents my family gave me this year was a Kindle Paperwhite, which has a touchscreen that makes highlighting and notation much easier.

I hope I’m not the only writer who gets a little sick of reading their book by the time it’s ready to publish. I struggle with impatience, and it doesn’t help that the question of what I’ll write next starts nagging me long before I finish with the work at hand. Yes, I get distracted by that next shiny thing. In this case, it’s two shiny things, so I’ll have to decide which should come first.

Anyway, I apologize for being so terrible at estimating the time I need to finish something. I thought I’d have An Illusion of Trust polished before Christmas, and then I thought surely by the end of January. Now we’re almost a week into February and it still doesn’t have that final gleaming coat. But it’s close—oh, so close.

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