After a year and a half, after one really intense month of drafting (last April) followed by a fairly intense 4 weeks of revising (mid-February to TODAY), I finished up the revisions to the Blackbeard novel!

I'm really happy with the end results. I had a tricky task, because I changed it from a book with two point-of-view characters to one, so all the sections dealing with the other character had to be carefully tweaked. It was the kind of detail work that gives you a headache after a while ("Wait, he can't say that, he wasn't there to see that, now she's thinking that..." etc., etc.). But it's done now.

I met all the goals I'd set for myself for the book -- expand the emotional aspects of the book, get inside my protagonist's head more, and expand it a bit -- it went from 307 pages and 69,500 words to a nice even 330 pages and 74,500 words (using MS Word's wordcount feature).

And I'm already contemplating what to do next...

I've got an hour or 2 to do just that this afternoon, over in Chapel Hill -- Elizabeth is going to a friend's wedding shower, and while she's there I'm hitting a coffee shop with my notebook and some "idea folders" full of ideas for the next novel project. Should be fun. Later!

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Today's Quote:
That just goes to show that you never know what's going to happen in life, she decided. Her gaze came to rest on Mitch once more. I just have to trust my instincts. It's okay to never really know for sure about everything in life, because everything has a way of working out, in the end.

"But starting tomorrow," she added, looking directly at Mitch, her new partner. "We've got work to do."

Yes, Ella decided. I could definitely get used to life on Ocracoke.