The Eagle Has Left the Nest (Carrying a Book)
This morning at 2 am EST, after eight months, 61,000 words and eighty-three drafts, I sent my newest book to my editor at Beaten Track Publishing . I’m romantically inclined to say writing this book was a labor of love, but the practical me says it was just labor. Eight months is pretty good for me. Usually it takes me a year to write a book, though Unbroken only took nine months. I am amazed I wrote 30,000 words in the last three months so essentially half the book was written in three months. Reading it though a last time this week before submitting it, I realized once again that the story I tell isn’t the story I sat down to write back in August. And months into the writing of it, I realized I had to restructure it because the way I envisioned telling the story—in flashback, starting at the end and working forward—just didn’t work for the story. At first the idea of writing a different book and structuring it differently to my first idea, scared me, but this is my fifth