Time for Some Holiday Love--or at least laughs

I'll admit it. I am sort of a scrooge in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  Weird since I am a bona fide PK and a former ballet chick who spent more time dancing in the Nutcracker than I care to recall.

But as my life increases complicating exponentially (happens when you own a brewery whose sales grew by over 500% in one year and are gaining ground as an author with 3 publishers, i.e. I made money this quarter at it) I find myself, sort of...well...annoyed by this whole Holiday Thing.

It's in my way, if you must know, with all the shopping and menu planning and decorating not to mention the kids home and underfoot, and the DH flopping around needing to be entertained.  Gone are my quiet days of writing/marketing planning on the very few days I'm not out selling beer.

Sigh.

But, this year has a bit of a different feel to it thanks to some news I got in the last twenty four hours.
I received my first official R&R and those in the know tell me that I got a lot more encouragement than is the "norm" from this publisher so I'm feeling good but also feeling the pressure to get it done, get it done RIGHT (nay: perfectly), and get it done by December 30.

In the immortal words of my bartender we like to call "Shaggy"

I've done my head writing, blogging, facebooking, twittering, and whatnot post the Big Birthday Weekend.  Now it's time to make this happen.

This leads me to the whole point of this rather rambling post (which I can't wait to hear about from you fabulous followers):  Don't send out any submission to any publisher (big or small) without a very serious 3 step review process.  Don't take your sister's, or secretary's or BFF's "OMG! This is so great! You are going to be famous" comments to heart.  They are supposed to say that.  Take that, then tuck it away along with your ego and turn the thing over to a good critique partner.  Then, after you have taken their comments under advisement and changed/revised/rewritten as necessary give it to a Beta Reader.  Then, after you've done that and if you can dig up any more semi professional advice, give it a hard line edit. Check for everything from pacing problems, dangling participles, over used words (there are some websites that will check these for you), purple prose/cliches, to messy punctuation and sloppy formatting.

Then....read it one more time.

Then submit it.

I did that with this particular WIP.  Now I'm gonna start all over, take it apart, add about 15-25k more words to add some depth to a few characters and send it back per her request.  But not until I've actually paid an editor who has worked with me before to do all of the above for me.

It's not as expensive as you might think.  And worth it in the end.

Happy Holidays or Bah Humbug whatever your case may be.

Liz