Off on my Jollies

Tomorrow morning I’m off on my hols for two whole weeks. A much needed break, if I do say so myself. Through the course of today I’m going to try and put together and schedule some blog posts to automatically go up while I’m away, but I expect today will be quite busy at work (being my last day and all) and tonight I’ve got some packing to do – so don’t be disappointed if I miss out.

I’ve turned in my final edits for Eternally & Evermore. I think it’s pretty clean but as the author you get so close to your text that it’s often difficult to see even your most obvious mistakes. Hopefully I’ve given the final proof-reader a tough job to find anything that needs changing, but we all know how fresh eyes spot things others don’t.

It’s been long enough since I turned the document over to my editor that when I got it back and went through it myself I was able to read it almost as if I was reading it for the first time, and I was surprised at how well the story created the emotions in me that I set out to stir when I wrote it. For example, there are two points in the story where I almost started crying as I read it – for two very different reasons, one happy, the other sad.

It’s quite strange, don’t you think, that we humans can react to two such wildly conflicting emotions in essentially the same way. For example, I cried when my son was born. Why? It was a happy event. The happiest. So why cry? Crying is what you do when you’re upset isn’t it?

Whatever.

I hope you’ll enjoy any excerpts I am able to schedule for the next two weeks. In fact, I hope you’ll enjoy them so much you’ll go out (or rather, stay in and log on) and buy the book. My editor said something the other day. She said it’s a story about choices. About how the choices we make set our lives on different paths, and how even though we may have made the wrong choice at some point, it’s possible to make up for it later by making the right choice. Or just as possible to compound it by making more bad choices.

The protagonist and antagonist of the book are examples of this. They were childhood friends, but their choices led them in different directions in life. And when they come together again later in life, it’s the choices they then make, correcting or compounding previous bad choices, that determine their fates.