For various reasons I had to send my editor my unfinished first-draft manuscript today.

Oh my God. What an awful feeling. I am such a control freak. Usually my first drafts are only read by my bosom friends, about whom I know blackmailable secrets. The thought that someone else, MY EDITOR, upon whose opinion hangs my career, is reading my first crappy draft makes me chew on my nails.

I’ve taught three courses in the past two months and in each of them I’ve said: “Write crap in the first draft. You can fix it later.”

I never said “Unless your editor asks to see it, and then you will be facing a pit of humiliation as deep as the seventh abyss of hell.”

I think I will go hyperventilate now and attempt to forget all the stupid things I’ve put in this draft which has not been edited at all. (In contrast, I’ve edited this blog post four times.)

I go back to work tomorrow.

And I thought I had crows of doubt about writing.

I have an excellent childminder, quite a well-adjusted baby, and a job I’m good at and can step back into without overwhelming worry or effort.

Please, please, please let me sleep tonight.

I just emailed the revised draft of One Night Stand to my editor, whom I will be seeing at the Romantic Novelists’ Association awards luncheon at the Savoy tomorrow.

Terrified? Me? Never.

crawls under couch

I’m too tired to write tonight; have managed 453 words, most of that written in the John Lewis cafe while Fecklet napped in his pushchair. The John Lewis cafe is one of my new writing venues because it is merely a shop floor away from a nursing lounge and a baby changing room. However, it doesn’t do decaf lattes so it is far from ideal.

(Ah, what a change from ten years ago, when my quest was to find a cafe that didn’t mind my chain-smoking Silk Cuts while marking GCSE coursework.)

I’m having pacing problems with this book. For one thing, it’s just slightly longer than my usual books, so I have to adjust my mental measuring stick a little, and I’m not exactly sure how much. I sort of figure I’ll finish the book and then add or subtract.

For another, I’m trying to fit the character arc into the timings dictated by several plot factors: my heroine is pregnant and this book covers the nine months from conception to birth; she is writing a book and the book covers the time from writing to publication; there are a few other things that secondary characters do that either seem to take too much time or too little. I have one plot strand that I cannot figure out what to do with, because I don’t want to wind it up too quickly, but I don’t want it to take up too much space, either.

And of course I have the problem that I’m writing in first person, so the hero’s character arc has to be shown from the heroine’s point of view, and so I can’t go so much into it, and so it’s not quite as easy to make up the word count by exploring his side of things.

Anyway. The crows of doubt are present, but not really looming. It’s more like they’re hanging out in some nearby trees in case they’re needed.