The Good News

With my belly laden full of incompatible but tasty hors d'oeuvres served at my sister's 15th birthday party today, I come to share with you my good news.Good news seems best served on a full stomach, don't you think? Plus, I feel that I need to write this news down as many places as possible to convince myself that it is real.

Friday I received the good news from the fine folks at Writer's Digest Books that my proposal for my book titled Master the Scene has been accepted for publication in Fall, 2007, and will be included as a feature in their Book Club.

It's been an interesting journey. The idea for the book had been percolating for months as I edited novel after novel (freelance editing is one of my main gigs). Even some of my best writing clients have trouble with the purpose, texture, concept, etc of the scene--that lovely little foundational unit of energy, action, information, among other things--that brings a story alive, draws the reader right on in. As I stumbled across the lack of scene writing in my clients' work, I realized that I had only become conscious of the scene as a "thing" to be employed in my writing about six years ago myself. I'd managed to intuitively use scenes pretty well, but not always, and with some trouble until I met Stephanie Moore (who passed away this year to my great sadness), who brought the scene to the forefront of my writer's consciousness. I owe her a lot, and the foreword of the book recounts my first meeting of her, so that makes me doubly excited.
Another precious bit of synchronicity is that I've just completed an article for Writer's Digest Magazine on Writer's Retreats--and it was at a writer's retreat in January organized by my pal Susan Bono that I wrote the bulk of my proposal for Master the Scene.

Here I am working on THE proposal!

Then, the very fine editor at Writer's Digest Books who has worked with me on this project from the beginning helped me refine and tweak and tune my proposal until it met both our visions of what the book can be.

While I always dreamed that my first publication would be a novel, I feel no less elated that it's this book. This almost feels more right. I can't explain it.

Wow!