JENNY: Beta Reader: That Would Be You

A beta reader is somebody who reads a story prior to publication and looks for the bugs, glitches, and general goofs. You were already beta readers when you read the "Cordially invited" stuff we put up and commented on it.

Right now we are discussing whether we should do this--I jumped the gun because I THOUGHT we'd already agreed to it but I was wrong, so blame me--or if we should wait until closer to a pub date which we don't have yet ot until Jen gives us the editing notes which could be weeks. If we do decide to go with it, what we'll probably do is put it up here on the blog, since the first chapter is in four parts that are in order: Mare, Lizzie, Dee, and Xan. And since the collage is finished, too, I can put that up at the end and it will make more sense then.

And then you can bask in anticipation until next summer because I'm pretty sure that's when it's coming out,although we will report back on the fights we have over the rewrite, the copy edit, the galleys, the book cover . . .

Oh, and that first page you deciphered? Very good job, but we changed it. That's the book writing biz, one rewrite after another.

Eileen: c'est finis!!

Unbelievably, considering how micromanaging both Jen and I are, the manuscript is off. Krissie was able to pry it from our crabbed, clawed fingers and force us to email it to our editor. Of course, now twelve hours later we found some stuff we really, really want to change, but thank heavens, we have to wait.

I'm sitting here feeling rudderless. What do I do now? This thing has consumed us for so long, like a big literate tapeworm, that I don't know how to survive without it.(it occurs to me that you should never leave your metaphors to a medical person. I could have said magical obsession or something equally as poetic, especially considering the fact that if this had been a tapeworm of any kind I would have at least lost weight over it. Yeah. Not so much).

Okay, yeah, I do know what I'm going to do. I'm going to spend the next two days watching all the movies I missed and then get onto the other project I'm in the middle of. Then I'm going to hold my breath that it really is as good as we think it is.

One more thing. We thought it was going to be a really fun book. A neat idea, a wonderful collaboration, and a compelling story. It's nice to know we were right. It's been a rare privelege to work with my two co-conspirators. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I can't wait for you to see it.

eileen

KRISSIE: It's almost done

Phew! It's almost on its way out the door (until our editor shoots it back to us). Hard work, but worth every second, even if I did have to throw a Lizzie-like temper tantrum (not that Lizzie actually throws temper tantrums) and tell the two cantankerous sisters to stop tinkering. Nothing like being ready to turn a book in, as we we were on the first of August, and then rip it apart and redo it.
It was worth it.
Not that I want to let Elric go. Someone who looks like Howl of Howl's Moving Castle and acts like Alan Rickman is pretty damned delicious. Lucky Lizzie.

JENNY: Status Report

You're probably wondering what happened to us.

Beta readers. A curse and a blessing. We had the book finished and were going through the editing process and then our beta readers pointed out a few, uh, problems. We won't go into them here but they were significant. So we came home from National, changed offstage Rellie into on stage Xantippe and gave her a point of view, a henchwoman named Maxine, and an unsatisfactory boyfriend named Vincent; revamped the plot; added a True Desire spell, an Impulse Spell, some extra magic, a death (don't worry, we could spare him), and several in-jokes that makes us fall down laughing but by now we're giddy so just ignore us; and did another couple of rewrites. And now we're ready to go. When we all sign off on the manuscript tomorrow, it's done. It goes out. We're finished.

Until it comes back with the editor's notes, of course.

However we do feel that you can never have enough beta readers, particularly for the first chapter, so we're planning on putting up a PDF of Chapter One with the link here, and then inviting you all to tell us where we went wrong. Because we know you will.

So stay tuned. We haven't forgotten you. We're just tying up some loose ends here and we'll be back.

Really.