One More Month!

One month from today, Once Upon Stilettos will be in bookstores. Actually, some stores may have it a little earlier and some a little later, but that's the official release date. As much as I need to do between now and then, I'm sure the month will fly by. I don't know why I'm so excited. I've already read it and I know what happens. I guess I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else thinks -- and then going into hiding when everyone wants to kill me (or is that book three? They're starting to blur -- yes, I am a tease).

So, now I have an author party to go to tonight, rather than last night, as my calendar and my brain seem to have been one day off. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to do that -- heck, I'd even looked at the event web site earlier in the day to get directions to the location and didn't notice that the party was on a different day than I thought it was. One possibility is that they started contacting me about this book festival back in the fall, before the web site was updated for this year's event, and I put the date from last year's event on my calendar.

Although I do feel a little silly, there was no harm done as I realized my error before I got dressed and left the house. It could have been much, much worse, considering the fact that I went through most of Thursday thinking it was Friday. I could have shown up on Thursday night, thinking it was Friday, for a party I thought was on Friday night that was actually on Saturday. Now I just hope I end up at the right place tonight, since when I was talking about it to one of my writer friends this morning, she thought it was at a different place. I guess there's a difference between the Southfork Hotel and Southfork Ranch (yes, I've lived in this area for as long as I have, and I've never been to Southfork Ranch).

Since I was at home last night, after watching Dr. Who I plunged into my revisions, then promptly had an anxiety attack because I realized I was going to have to cut a whole, huge chunk of the second chapter. I'm not sure why that freaked me out so much because it's not an incredibly great scene (one reason it has to go) and the scene that will replace it will move the story forward and be a lot funnier. I guess part of it is that "first cut is the deepest" thing and it was my first realization that this revision is going to take more than changing a few words (I knew it, but it's not the same as really facing it). Part of it is that I've already rewritten the scene in question at least once. In the proposal stage I cut out a scene, then added the one that's there.

Come to think of it, I always end up rewriting chapter two. I know how to start a book. It's transitioning from the opening to the rest of the story that sometimes gives me fits. The first chapter two rewrite was when I had only three chapters and wasn't sure how the rest of the book would go. This one is being done with the entire book in mind. I just hope my editor doesn't freak out when the first few chapters of the final book aren't much like the first three chapters she's already read. I'm sure she's used to that by now.