In my forty years as an engineer, supervisor, manager, and eventually senior executive you will not find anyone that thinks I am patient.  Patience has been a learned behavior and one that has been poorly learned.  I try my best to allow time to pass for tasks and goals to be achieved.  That is not the same as being patient.  If I know something can’t be done in less than three weeks, I will follow up in two weeks and then daily after.  Again, that’s not patience.

Writing short stories requires little patience.  You write for two or three days, depending on the workload and inspirations.  You edit for a day, and you load it to publish.  Typically, no more than seven days later it is on the net and you are ready to see how it did.

No patience required.  All that is needed is an understanding of the time required and I can manage around my impatience.

I finished my first full draft of the novel, FIRST TENTATIVE STEPS, in December of 2020.  It took me some ten or eleven months to go from first outline to “The End” and I thought, heck, I’m done.  Boy was I wrong.

I found the support of a few beta readers, one came through with a review. Kate (@KPasithea on Twitter) gave me amazing feedback and I took my time finding the best way to clean up the manuscript.  I waited for feedback from the others.  It never came (note: remember my impatience).

I started looking for editors.  Erotica editors are hard to find.  The next thing was the conversations with them.  I decided that if I could not connect with them, then I would not trust their edits.  I worked around my schedule and theirs and by the end of February I had it down to two editors.

It came down to Lauren Humphries-Brooks.  She understood where I was in the process, and that I was a rookie.  The comments about the novel and subsequent phone calls always left me feeling good about the process.  I have nothing but great things to say about Lauren. 

As you know from earlier posts, I took the novel, screwed up my courage, sent the query letter and subsequently, it was rejected.  I reminded myself that every overnight success took a lot of hard work, determination, and struggle before that last night when success was achieved.

I’ll bet you I’ve read the rejection letter at least one hundred times.  Too long.  Not an issue. Not sure what the kink of the novel was.  Not an issue – they researched it.  No hook.  Big problem.

How do I fix that problem and quickly?  This book is going to be able to walk before publishing.  Right now, it’s old enough to crawl quickly into the kitchen cabinets I forgot to child proof.  Lauren has a great practice, and she is very good.  Translation, she is very busy.  If I catch her at the right time, I can get a quick answer.  If I catch her in the middle of projects, then I get a quick eight-week turnaround.  Not bad as editor work goes, but remember the no patience thing.

I was on Twitter and started a conversation about the difficulty of writing a hook.  The key question was: How do you set the hook?  There are obvious answers, and then there were the answers I was looking for.

In a mystery, shock the reader in the first paragraph and the hook him in the first scene.  At least that’s the way I thought at the time.  What about in an Erotic Romance?

A friend recommended Katee Robert’s books.  I got one, The Marriage Contract, and started listening to it.  First scene had me hooked.  A murder is committed, and the reader knows who did it right away.  I thought I had it.  I got a second book, The Wedding Pact.  First chapter, I was hooked.  No murder, no mystery, but the same series.  I was lost.  I thought I was going to have to rewrite the entire novel, but had no clue.

During the back and forth on Twitter Katheryn CJ Hall (@kathrynhall_) answered one of my questions.  I looked at her profile, and lo and behold, she is a published author and an editor. 

I was eager to get on with her help.  My years of experience told me that when I hire a consultant, the communication chemistry has to be right, or it will go bust.  We set up a conversation where we talked about my book, my issues and the rejection. We talked about possible hooks, and points of view, and by the end I decided my first instinct was correct.

She read through the first three chapters, found a number of issues, and suggested several possible hooks and ways to deliver them.  Friday, I started, Saturday I worked most of the day rewriting the first three chapters, and today I did a thorough check and a light edit. 

I have no idea where this is going to go. I’m sharing this because I want to see if anyone else has the same issues.  I hope, in some way, my now eighteen-month saga to create, edit and publish this novel will help new authors.  I wish I would have stumbled across similar information when I started this journey.  Maybe I just failed to find them.  Maybe they are too busy writing a novel to take the time to chronicle the steps.  Either way, I want to leave this as a reminder – if only to myself – of what it took to publish my first novel.