cover me: i'm going in

I've just come from catching up with my A&U editor, who said so many lovely things about my writing that my ego is currently too large to fit inside my rather humble apartment and is consequently perched on the rooftop throwing stones at passersby and singing bawdy songs at the top of its metaphorical lungs. Everybody should have the chance to work with such lovely people is all I can say.

Of course, I'm sure I'll be gnashing my teeth over all the squiggly, niggly, consequence-altering changes I'll need to wrangle into submission by the end of the edits. Not to mention all the stupid little writerly habits that plague me. Exhibit A:

I have been so astoundingly successful in not thinking about Pledged that I have genuinely forgotten everything and anything that happens in the manuscript,1 and thus I managed to inspire no small suspicion in my editor that I was simply pretending to be Deborah Kalin and had the real author locked up in a basement somewhere. Er, oops. Still, can't accuse me of not doing my best to come at these edits "fresh"!

One thing I was sorta refusing to think about was how the ending of Pledged would be received. Because I love the ending, love it in a hill-I'll-die-on kind of way, and I so wanted my editor to love it as much as I did, and what if she didn't…?

But look!2

1. Truefax. Just this Saturday gone Tessa eyeballed me in alarm and filled me in on the ending I'd apparently written. I plead, er, distraction. Or something. [↩]
2. And no, blood is not the last word of the book. No spoilers here. Tess, I hope you're proud of the restraint I just showed. [↩]