AprilWhiteBooks

I was talking to my editor today - she has a cold, so there was no wine involved. It was also 10am, so strike two for wine. She's reading the first two acts of Changing Nature while I sprint through the last chapters, and she had a couple of notes. When I'm done sprinting (which basically means writing my fingers off) - hopefully in about two weeks - I'll make some changes to the draft as a whole, then get the entire thing back to her by Halloween. In my conversations with her I recognized a couple of things about my writing process, and this is where the Throwback Thursday part comes in. My first Marking Time notes were made in March, 2010, and I eventually published it in November, 2012. I was done sooner, but had to go through the whole agent-query process just to make sure my ego and confidence were firmly stuck around my ankles. The short answer to why did I publish Marking Time independently is that agents wouldn't look at a debut YA novel over 100k words long b

I still had one dagger left and Jehanne was focused on directing her remaining fighters like they were her own personal chess pieces. It would be so easy to bury the point between her shoulder blades, but even the fact that I had that thought sent a foreboding chill curling around my guts. I was not a killer. “Hey!” I yelled at her and she spun in surprise to face me. She said something in French that didn’t sound like “it’s nice to see you, would you like some tea,” right before she lunged at me with her sword. Well, crap. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. Apparently, she didn’t have the same aversion to killing that I did because she wasn’t kidding around with that sword-thrust. I dove to the side to get out of range of Jehanne’s sword, and practically fell over Connor’s clothes. I heard my mom’s voice in my head yelling at him to pick up his stuff, and in the next moment I could have kissed him for leaving it lying around because his