Romance Novel weblog by Carolyn Jewel

Writer's Diary

Monday, March 12, 2007

A sharp tiurn to the left, then left again

40,409 for Magellan's Witch. It's a psychological barrier for me. At about 40K words I start thinking, hey, that's almost halfway done! I haven't deleted those two chapters because, as it happens, I may need them. So I'm going to let them hang out for a while. The story took a sharp turn to the left the other day when I turned a tattoo into a burn mark that then turned into a living thing. Which was awesome, I have to say. And then while I was watching 300 on Sunday, I had this other left turn and I swear, I almost got out the notebook and started writing, but it was a simple enough notion that I wasn't in danger of forgetting it.

My contract for MW came today, which means I had to read it before signing. Not much fun, but pretty straightforward to the extent these things are ever straightforward. It's scary all the stuff they put in about disasters just waiting to befall a hapless writer. Not turning your book in on time, turning in a crappy book, not being able to fix said crappy book, turning in your book but not getting the edits done in time, stealing the whole book from your cousin Ed (I DO NOT have a cousin Ed!), them not publishing your book after all, floods, fire, subrogation, audio rights, indemnity and the laws of the State of New York... It's enough to give a writer a flaming case of hives. Which I had for a while, let me tell you.

But then I got some work done on Magellan's Witch and my two left turns are kind of cool. So I'm mostly okay. But up too late.

Darn time change.

Labels: Contracts, Magellan's Witch