Woke at six AM so as to be alert for a virtual visit at seven AM, the class being in the Eastern Time Zone. That chat was about Crispin.
Phone chat with my principle publicity person working out some marketing ideas for the future.
Then I sat down to continue my work on book A, inventing as I go, though I have a pretty good sense of the planned sequence. I have, perhaps, twenty-five pages to go before a first draft is done.
Take a walk in the forest. The wind is so strong, a gigantic, old Aspen tree comes crashing down fifteen feet from where I am walking. My heart beats a little faster.
Back home, into my E‑mail comes a long list of questions from the copy editor of book B. Huh! I thought that book was done. But no, issues of grammar, context, and the kind of question copy editors ask, such as, “This basic plot point in the book makes no sense. You need to change it. In two days.”
(I have been working on this book for three years.)
In any case, the copy editor’s questions are linked to a manuscript (MS) that has a different pagination than the MS I have. I work as best I can and then e‑mail the editor of book B, and say I really need a manuscript that’s in sync. Reply: everyone here has gone home for the day. We’ll send it tomorrow.
(Too bad I work at home.)
Flummoxed—a word Charles Dickens introduced (1837) into the English language when he wrote The Pickwick Papers—and not having the inventive energy to go back to book A, I opened up the mail and looked at the marked-up MS of book C. Glanced through it and called the editor, who is also a good friend and we chatted productively. The pleasure of chatting with my editor friend had me starting to work (Book C) on some of his remarks.
By the end of this evening (10 PM or so) I’ll have entered his line edits into that book C.
I think I’ll read some other writer before I go to sleep tonight.
3 thoughts on “A day in the life of this writer”
Thanks for sharing this… those of us who are writing books for fun have no idea how difficult it is for great writers to write so well… it’s hard work, you do it well and it’s very well worth it…
Yet the question still remains: If a tree falls in the woods and Avi is not around to hear it, does anybody else right about it?
Nice to know what a successful author goes through in a day. We self pubed authors with day jobs sometimes think we work hard. You’ve just shown me that working hard doesn’t go away when one attains editors and agents.