Elizabeth, Me, Allison

Hey, friends, I promised I would give an update once I had gone through another round of edits, and I just finished on Friday. Boy, was I glad to send those edits in! But, first, let me just share that I got to do something very exciting earlier this month, which was to meet my editor, Allison Moore, in person. Here we are in the Bloomsbury offices, along with my agent, Elizabeth Bewley. I also had the privilege of meeting many other Bloomsbury team members, in marketing, publicity, design, and editing. I am so excited to be working with all of them!

On to the editing process! A lot of life had happened for me since I turned in my first round of edits (broken foot! starting a new book! kid stuff!), and so when I received the second round, I had to completely realign myself to YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN DELAYED again. Even though I had been in a cycle of writing a book, querying, starting a new one for many years, this still felt different. In any case, my second round of edits was nowhere near as extensive as the first. My editor included some overall notes plus line edits. We set a deadline for me to turn them in three weeks later, and it seemed like no big deal. In one sense, it wasn’t. But here’s where the title of this post comes in: a huge wave of doubt and second-guessing myself hit as I was going through the notes.

Why now? Perhaps it’s because my editor said my book was in pretty good shape–not that I think this means I’ll be done after this round of edits–and that means everything is REAL. Before, even though I was super-excited, it still felt unreal. But people will actually be reading this book and have opinions about it at some point in the near future. Winter 2021 doesn’t feel nearly so far away in that context.

So, suddenly, I started re-checking every fact, even things my editor hadn’t flagged for me to double-check, out of my own self-doubt. If you aren’t aware, my book is about a girl from 1995 who travels to 2020, so while it isn’t set in the nineties, it’s still about a girl whose world view is the nineties. Even though I grew up in the nineties, I did not rely on memories alone. When I first wrote the book, I went through yearbooks, watched documentaries, did a ton of internet research, talked to people who were teens in the nineties, watched movies and read books from that time. And… I did that much of that all over again during this draft, just to confirm what I already had. I did end up making a few tweaks, but still.

So here’s a funny story about redoing my research: As you know if you’ve been following me, I use Scrivener. One of the features I love is that I can pull all of my research into the same file where I’m writing and just scroll down to it as a reference. Well, when I went to import some of this new research into Scrivener, I found that I’d already imported that same information the first time I researched.

Ah well. In the end, I came to the conclusion that when people ultimately read my book, there will probably be some adult readers who take issue with particular points regarding the nineties based on their own experience or think “Clueless” is an accurate representation of technology in 1995 (sooo not life anywhere but Hollywood and I bet not even there). Like anything else, my book is about how my character experienced technology and the world up to that point. And that’s always the trick when writing, right? That not everyone has the same experience.

What I do know is that with every round of edits my book gets better. Despite the doubts, I’m excited for it to be out in the world and love the team that is helping me get it there!

So, now that my second round of edits are off, I am diving back into my new project and gearing up for the craziness of that time between Halloween and the holidays.

Stay tuned for another update soon.