My Muse is named Katie

A blogger who is an excellent writer (Rob Hamel over at Thoureau’s Laughing) has a post about his muse being off on vacation or somewhere. He says he wants to write... No, he needs to write. But without the muse he is unfulfilled.

Well, that’s not exactly what he says. Go read his post, and then come back. I’ll wait right here. I promise.

See? I’m still here waiting.

OK. Here’s my point. As many of my regular readers know, my writing was rejuvenated by an energetic critique partner named Katie. She graciously offered to read my first chapter or two, and then was so complimentary and built up my ego so much that I just HAD to send her more. She, along with her critique partner Pat, made suggestions, and before long I had added 10,000 words, and had a story that was ten times better than the one my agent had been offering to publishers.

The novel is now really good. In all modesty. Well, OK, with no shred of modesty! But it’s still really good. There are three passages in it that make me cry, and I wrote it! If you read it you’d be bawling too.

Now that the holidays are behind us Katie and Pat and I are working on my synopsis and query letter to get this manuscript into the hands of an enthusiastic agent and see if some publisher doesn’t recognized it as serious competition for Nicholas Sparks.

Of course I’ll keep you well informed of all the offers I get. In fact, if I get any rejections (unlikely) I’ll let you know about those as well.

Ah, to dream! (I TOLD you my ego was out of control!)

Back to my point (there IS one hiding around here somewhere...) Oh, yes. I happened to tell Katie that I had written the first few chapters of a sequel to the first novel. She casually asked if she could have a look at the first chapter.

Now I haven’t spent much time on it lately, because I’ve been busy with rewrites on the first book, and now the synopsis. I did pull it up a couple of times and re-read what I had already written. I’d tweak it a bit, and then save it to disk and close it. I haven’t really added any significant pages for a couple of months.

Last week I sent her the first chapter to look at when she had time. Yesterday she sent it back with comments.

OMG!

She loves it! She had very little to suggest or add, and tells me she’s salivating waiting for more. As Carol said, there goes my ego again!

Suddenly I’m dying to write the next three chapters, and I’ve got some new ideas for plot twists that ought to work really well.

Ahhhhh. My muse. Katie!