I have a confession to make. Not the kind you’d take to the confession box; it’s more of a little white lie I told myself back in November 2024 about my book, which I had just finished writing.
No two ways about it, I had my blinders on. How I saw the situation was this: I had a first draft that I had edited as I was writing, and it sat at 230,000 words. Now, I knew 230K was too long (like, way too long) because it had been hammered into me that a debut novel could not be more than 120K words. It was a hard rule of publishing, and they were not going to break it on account of me.
My first lie to myself was that I figured if I got it down to 188K, then when I went to pitch my book to a literary agent at the historical novel conference coming up in June 2025, the agent would say, “188K; I can work with that and get it down to 120K.”
I lived with that lie until June 2025, when I finally had to face the reality that any flexibility around that 120K number was all on the “less than” side.
That’s what I have spent the last year doing, and in three weeks time, I will show up at this year’s historical novel conference in Ireland with a manuscript that’s 120,000 words. Major, but necessary, accomplishment.
Back when my manuscript was 230K and I thought getting it down to 188K would do the trick, that’s when I resurrected this blog with the idea that most of my posts would be about this very topic: following the journey to getting my book published. The writing, the revising and editing the manuscript to death, going to book conferences, pitching the book to literary agents, an agent saying yes to taking on my book, the submission to publishers, and publication; or if I didn’t get an agent, I’d self-publish or hybrid publish, and in all cases, the book tour of Ireland (why do you think I chose to set my book in Ireland?), and then whatever happened after that. My idea was to create in this blog a living document of one person’s journey to a published novel. No one else was doing that, and I’m sure that’s not because it isn’t a riveting topic.
However, when I came up with that idea, I had the notion that by today, August 9, I would be much further along on my publishing journey, that my book would already be published or in a publisher’s hands, and that this past year of blogging would have been full of details of new things I was learning about publishing. Instead, this past year has been spent slashing and burning and revising, none of which is at all interesting to anyone. There’s only so much to say about cutting 110,000 words and keeping one’s sense of humor while attending to such matters.
Instead, my blog morphed into a column of my observations on life with a handful of book-related posts thrown in to keep me honest.
So, unless I come back from this conference where they’ve said, “Just joking, it’s not 120K, it’s 100K this year,” then I’m about to get down to the business of getting my manuscript off my hard drive and out into the world. I’ve been told this can be a two-year process. I don’t think I have two years of book-related posts in me, so we look forward to more of life’s observations ahead from me.
But first, I’ve got a vacation to get to: Scotland, Ireland and Japan. One of the great things about not being holed up writing and editing: I get to travel. It’s been awhile.
I’ll keep you posted.
This week, a Leonard Cohen song covered by Joe Cocker …