HAPPY NEWS

Say what you will about the Ides of March, but I received some happy news today from Kirkus Review!

My editor, Kaylan Adair, at Candlewick, sent me a pre-publication sneak peek at the Kirkus review of Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, will be published online next week. (May 1st, in print.) They say, in part:

A fresh retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" with an interesting and meaningful plot twist. Vividly enchanting descriptions transport the reader to the beautiful surroundings. Lucie is a brave and sympathetic heroine who ultimately writes her own happy ending. For readers who love reimagined fairy tales and strong female characters. (Fiction. 13-adult)

The readers at Kirkus are a tough crowd. They weren't so crazy about Alias Hook, so this review is a big thrill for me!

Also pleased that they rate the prospective age group as 13 to adult. Just a reminder that this is not exactly the Disney version!

Thanks, Kirkus!

BEASTY NEW YEAR!

Looky what arrived on my virtual desktop this week!

In the publishing biz, they call this a cover flat — the dust jacket of a hardcover book spread out flat. Pretty cool, huh?

My intrepid editor, Kaylan Adair, at Candlewick Pres, sent this out to me ASAP, the cover flat for Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, to get my Happy New Year off to a boffo start. It worked!

I'm very jazzed about the Gothic elegance of this artwork — dark and lovely — and how it suits the mood of my story. And I could NOT be more thrilled about how the gorgeousness of this concept extends beyond the front cover all the way to the spine and the flaps!

Pub date is July 10. Stay tuned!

(PS: And yes, the one typo I found in the jacket text will be corrected in the printed version. Can you spot it?)

BEAST UPDATE

Hey folks, here's another update in the Beast saga!

This week, I received a hard copy version of Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, straight from the copyeditor! So I was sharpening my quill pen to scrawl my "yea" or "nay" on suggested edits, supply alternate changes, if necessary, and seize my last opportunity to make any last-minute substantive alterations.

Fortunately not too many of those. Intrepid  Candlewick editor Kaylan Adair and I have already re-edited and revised this thing so many times, there weren't even any typos left for me to correct — only my persistent misspelling of one frequently-used word. And my always uncertain grasp on the realities of commas, and when to use them.

(For which, I apologize, retroactively, to anyone who has ever entrusted me to edit your manuscript. My approach to commas is creative and free-form, although not exactly correct— apparently!)

Anyway, shipped my shaggy Beast back to the publisher today. And I'm eagerly awaiting the next step on the road to my expected pub date, March 6, 2018.

Stay tuned!

OH HAPPY DAY!

And speaking of Beasts, as I was last post, here's an update from my editor, the inexhaustible Kaylan Adair:

"WE ARE DONE my dear!" Meaning we have finally completed line-edits on Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, and are ready to sprint into production — at last!

My line edits are done! Drinks all around!

Next stop: copyediting, where those last few pesky typos will be rooted out from wherever they're lurking.

The gorgeous cover (soon to be revealed!) has already been designed, and typesetting and formatting will be going on over the next couple of months.

(Which reminds me, if you operate or know of a book-review blog that might be interested in a preview copy of Beast for review, let me know via thew Contact Info up there in the corner, or message me at my FB hangout Lisa Jensen Books.)

So thrilled to finally be back on track with my beloved Beast!

Here's a rare sight from earlier this week: entire pages of manuscript text in the (dreaded) Track Changes program — without editorial notations! (Usually there's a daunting zebra pattern of red/blue editorial comments in the margins.) That's Roma the Cat in charge of pet therapy!

LOOKING ROSY

What does it mean when a girl gets roses from her editor?

I like to think it means that my novel, Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge is hovering on the brink of production — at long last!

It's been a very lengthy gestation. My editor, Kaylan Adair, and I have always been on the same page. But that culprit, Unforeseen Circumstances kept cropping up, delaying production and sending me back tp the keyboard again and again.

But last week, after I sent in my January edit, I got a note back from Kaylan, that the new revision "absolutely SINGS!"

The next day, I came home from yoga to find these beautiful, blood-red roses, with a lovely note from Kaylan! Roses loom very large in Beast's story, of course, so these were very appropriate — as well as gorgeous!

There was still some minor tweaking to do, but I think Beast is one pawprint closer to a bookstore near you!

Stay tuned . . .

MORE BEASTLY NEWS

It's Happy Dance time!

Yesterday, I received the email that every author longs to hear from her editor:

"Lisa!!! I think this is perfection! Truly! I have no further tweaks to suggest."

This came after one week (not counting the 3-day holiday) of wrangling between Editor Kaylan, from Candlewick, and moi over the Author's Note, to go in the back of the Beast book. 

We went five rounds in four days, cutting, pasting, snipping, and shaping. But it's good that we're both so detail-oriented, because the result is — well, perfection!

So, yay! We're done!

The final ms has been copyedited, accepted, and approved. The Author's Note and jacket copy are finalized, and the cover design is almost done. Oh, and we now have a new title:

How I spent my July 4 weekend.

Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge

This title, and the scrupulously-edited Author's Note, are meant to signify to readers that my book is NOT the Disney version of the tale — no more than Alias Hook was the Disney version of Peter Pan.

But you all knew that, right?

(Speaking of which, the live-action adaptation of Disney's Beauty and the Beast is coming to a movie theatre near you in March, 2017, right around the time my Beast is hitting the bookshelves. Looks like it's going to be a Beastly spring!)

Anyway, my rough Beast's hour has come round at last, as he slouches now toward Candlewick to be born!

Stay tuned!

COPY THAT

In other book news—

I'm thrilled to announce that my next novel, Beast: A Love Story, has been officially copyedited and proofread!

I've been editing this book since July, off and on—mostly on—but I think it's all been worthwhile. My beta reader (okay, it's Art Boy) did a read-through after me, and he says it's honed to within an inch of its life.

So, tomorrow, this minutely marked hard copy goes back to my editor, Kaylan Adair, at Candlewick. Assuming she can decipher my corrections and suggestions (which may be assuming a lot), we are now one big step closer to production!

Which means I can go back to work on my next next novel for Candlewick. I'm working up a proposal and the first three chapters as we speak!

Stay tuned...

BUILDING A BETTER BEAST

Track Changes: editorial suggestions in blue, author whining in red.

I've been off the radar for a few weeks, and here's what I've learned: editing a book is not for sissies!

After writing two revisions of my next novel, Beast: A Love Story, for my smart and very thorough editor, Kaylan Adair at Candlewick, we were ready to move into the phase called Line Edits. I figured the hard part was over and I could cruise into what I consider the fun part —tinkering with a word here or there, reframing the occasional sentence, finishing up the details.

Hah!

Gone are the days when editing was done the genteel way, with a red pencil on hard copy, making a few tweaks here and there. Now we have a torture device known as the Track Changes program, by which a writer and her editor a continent apart can communicate virtually on the pages of the ms itself—one page, one paragraph, and yes, one line at a time.

The editor reads through the ms and makes suggestions in the Comments column at the right. There's a sample of what it looks like, up top. Editorial suggestions in blue; my feeble responses in red.

For the author, scrolling through the story and encountering the Comments is like entering a minefield. A lot of suggestions are perfectly reasonable and easily fixed—if we both agree there's a problem. But you never know when one is going to blow up in your face.

Maybe she has a different interpretation of a character's personality or motives than I do. Maybe she wants to subtly alter the course of the story in a way that never occurred to me—hmmm, let me think about it. Maybe she wants to soften a scene that I think has to be tough, or reconsider a certain  sequence of events.

Editing, the old-fashioned way!

Maybe her idea is better than mine—as is often the case—or maybe not. The point is, every suggestion has to be thought over and dealt with. When I agree with one of her suggested changes, it has to be implemented, which often includes either minor tweaking or large tracts of rewriting. If I don't agree, or have any other issue, I can leave my own Comments in the margin, attempting to defend my decision.

Either way, there's a lot more writing involved, whether I'm altering the story itself or attempting to compose Comments that will make any kind of rational sense. At times, the very act of writing a Comment makes me think about my decision in a new way, leading to a new batch of changes. Maybe reading one of her Comments triggers a revelation that neither one of us thought of before.

Back to the keyboard!

It's a lot more work than I ever expected, which is why I've sort of dropped off the face of the earth these last few weeks. I would never do it if I didn't have so much confidence in Kaylan and her opinions, based on how much she loves this story.

What's great about the process is it's giving me the luxury to really pay attention to the story again, page by page, line by line. It's not an author vs. editor battle; it's a collaboration. Together, we're midwifing the best Beast he can be!

LE MOT JUSTE

Did'ja miss me?

No, I did not fall off the edge of the world in a leaky pirate vessel, nor vanish in an untimely explosion of fairy dust.

I've been right here, hunkered down over the keyboard, hammering out my latest revision of Beast: A Love Story. And as much as I love this book, and as mind-expandingly fabulous my editor Kaylan Adair's suggestions have been for tweaking it into even better shape, let's hope this really in the last revision!

I don't want to dither around too much longer; I want to launch Beast in all his glory out into the world. But I also want him to be as buff as possible—and really, really ready for his close-up. And so I cobble away, word by word, sentence by sentence, scene by scene...well, you get the idea.

Fortunately, I love to edit. By this time in the process, you have a complete draft to work on, so you know where the plot is going, and more or less how it's getting there. (Let's hope so, anyway. Expect delays if you're still monkeying around with story structure at this late date.)

Be ready to kill, or at least cut your darlings

So now it's time for the more detailed wordsmithing—reorganizing sentences, phrase by phrase, and finding exactly le mot juste (as they say in France—which happens to be where Beast takes place, and where the best-known Beauty and the Beast tales originated). Picking the right word—this is the fun part for me!

But editing also involves pruning, and you have to buck up and be ready to kill your darlings. (Wait, that sentence was perfect! Except, that plot point has now been discarded. Oh, the humanity!) In the best-case scenario, you have the luxury of time (as I've had, this month) to approach this process with a scalpel, not a broadsword. 

Instead of the wholesale slaughter of entire paragraphs (although I've done plenty of that too), you have to select the most important ideas in that great slog of verbiage and find somewhere else to slot them in. In the sneakiest manner possible, of course, so it will look seamless, as if each sentence had never been anywhere else.

Not to be too anal about it, but every word counts. And as I race (okay, crawl) toward the finish line, I want to get as much juice as I can from every single one!

(Above: Illuminated manuscript, pre-1492, found here)

BEHOLD BEAST!

Normally, I'm a tad superstitious about illustrating the characters in my novels.

As a reader (and all writers are readers first), I hate it when a book I'm reading has the "wrong" artwork, especially on the cover—that is, a different face or image than the one I'm creating in my head as I read along.

Reading is the original interactive pastime, and the reader has to do a lot of the legwork of bringing the character(s) to life in her own imagination. So it's always a jolt when, every time I close the book, the wrong face is staring back at me.

On the other hand, as the writer, I make dozens of character sketches for myself; I need to know what they look like from one scene to the next. (Eye color, hair color, which cheek has the mole, which hand has the hook, etc.)

I usually don't share these images. But this has been a big month for Beast, the hero of my next book, Beast: A Love Story. Last week, I signed the contract with my new publisher Candlewick Press. This week, I hit the 'send' button on the first draft completed under the careful eye of my new editor, Kaylan Adair. So I thought it was time to give Beast a face and introduce him to the public!

This won't be the ultimate image, I'm sure. As my concept of the character, or my skill, improve, maybe I'll come up with something closer to the essence of my Beast.

But this is what he looks like right now—evolving before our eyes!

3, 2, 1, CONTRACT!

Break out the bubbly!

I've been working with my fabulous new editor, Kaylan Adair, at Candlewick for two months, but this week I finally got my contract for Beast: A Love Story!

Coming to a bookstore near you in the spring of 2017. Stay tuned for further details!

ME & MY VILLAGE

It takes a village for me to edit a book.

I never have any less than about three or four docs of plot, character motivations, Notes to Self, and, oh, yes, the ms doc itself, open at any given time on my trusty iMac. I'd need an IMAX-sized screen to accommodate all the docs I could be using!

(Notice, I even have random notes stuck in the clay mug off to the left, sheesh!)

Then I need a print-out of the ms, as in actual paper, to scribble on. (# 2 1/2 pencil: my weapon of choice.) This also helps me to actually see all the typos. I know they're in there, I can hear 'em breathing, but it's much easier for me to see them in print, instead of on a screen.

The final element to a productive work day? All the images I can find for inspiration!

This is my Pinterest page for the book I'm editing now, Beast: A Love Story. Yes, it's a fantasy, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast tale, but it's rooted in a specific historical period (rural Burgundy, France, ca. 1600). And anything I happen upon while cruising the Interwebs—dress, architecture, various objets, the French countryside, or potential character studies—goes into the file for future reference.

I am presently deep into the edit suggested by my terrific new editor, Kaylan Adair, chugging away toward my upcoming July 15 deadline.

All systems are go for me and my village!