Writing Update: It’s done

This past weekend I finished the last major revision/edits of my novel More (formerly The Haven). Rosie read it and loved it so I’m thinking it’s ready to submit. I need to make a few corrections and read it through once more, but it’s finished! Whew!

I’m letting it sit for a week or two before I finish it up.

When Rosie was about 1/4 of the way through it, she looked up at me, and I said, “Well?”

Her response, “Kiss me.”

Best. Valentine’s Day. Ever.

Now I’m working on expanding a short story I wrote into a novelette. For now, it’s called More Than Just a Good Book. It is about smart college boys Mark and Scott and just how much fun you can have at the library.

Quote I love: The Thirteenth Tale

I saw this quote today and thought it captured something any author ponders but will never know for sure: How will your work be perceived after your gone? Will it be read? Will it be dead? Will it survive time and the changes of our world? I like to believe in magic. I like to believe when I do get my work published (notice the “WHEN”) that I will putting a story out there that, at the very least, will make people feel something, anything (whether I’m dead or alive when they read it).

I copied this quote from another site, not the book, so I apologize if the wording is inaccurate in any way.

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. –Margaret Lea”

— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel)

Quote I love: Jennifer Beals on gay marriage

I came across this quote today. I like the way it was worded. There are so many people that live without love, yet they long for it. I don’t get how strangers can judge me and Rosie for finding what many strive for. I treasure every day I have with her.

“I’m always shocked that gay marriage is such a big deal. You have to realize how precious human life is, when there are tsunamis and mudslides, when there are armies and terrorists – at any moment, you could be gone, and potentially in the most brutal fashion. And then you have to realize that love is truly one of the most extraordinary things you can experience in your life. To begrudge someone else their love of another person because of gender seems to be absolutely absurd. It’s based in fear, fear of the other, fear of what is not like you. But when you are able to see lives on a day-to-day basis, rather than reducing it to politics, then it humanizes a whole community of people that were otherwise invisible.”

Jennifer Beals
IMDb.com