The Home Stretch

As I read my editor’s report, with ideas of how to polish my novel, I can’t help but feel a little dazed with emotion – the good kind.

I am reminded of a train journey through Western Europe a few years ago, when I had organised and reorganised the scenes of my book in Excel, as storybook towns floated past and the ground outside changed from green to snow-white and back to green again, and my laptop and I kept going.

Stephen King once said, ‘the scariest moment is always right before you start.’ He is probably right. When I wrote the first sentence of my book (and at the same time, the very last), I tried to find my way through thoughts so far removed from imagining what lies in-between, a finished novel, while enjoying the excitement of it all and facing the fear of the unknown and the endless questions about getting it right.

Even more foreign, was the thought of a professional editor reading my book! But surprisingly, this wasn’t as scary as I expected. It is rather freeing, in a way, when the path to being a published author becomes so much clearer than an abstract notion only and the what-ifs of the past.

So what is my book about? I know that throughout my past blog posts, I have never really given much away. And until I put some thought into my back cover copy, which shouldn’t be too far behind, this may not change very much.

But if you consider the country I was born in and the unusual history it brings, I hope that you can guess that I will, at least in my first novel, “write what should not be forgotten” – Isabelle Allende.