After all the hullabaloo (I love that word) of release week, I figured it was time for me to ‘fess up about how freaking HARD writing Problems in Paradise was.
First, this was the first book I wrote from start to finish under contract. And heck, I’d written something like six books before that. I thought I’d learned a lot from both the drafting experience and the editing process for Personal Assets and Running the Red Light. I was right…sort of.
August 14, 2013. Yes, although I looked it up to confirm the date, my memory was right on the money. That tells you something, people. It was a bad day.
I’d just returned home from my son’s high school orientation evening where they spent something like ninety minutes—NINE-ZERO—describing in detail the honor code and the execution squad that would snuff your child if he so much as “borrowed” a friend’s laptop charger. Smarty Boy was angry through the entire presentation too because he’d already run into the cliques of students who’d attended this school since they were in utero (whereas SB has had five different educational environments in his fourteen years, not including four different caregiver situations before he started “real school.”).
So I already needed an entire case of Chardonnay because I was convinced we’d made a very expensive school choice mistake. So what did I do? Sat down at my desk to check email, of course.
Repeat after me…Kelsey, you’re an idiot.
Thank you.
And right there in my in-box was an email from my editor with the developmental edits for Problems in Paradise. And God knows, I can’t resist opening anything that’s going to tell me how good, or how suck-ass, my work is.
Realistically, I doubt the feedback from my editor was as horrible as it felt that night. She told me I’d written a perfectly nice contemporary romance, but it wasn’t funny enough to fulfill the promise I’d made to the readers with the first two Texas Nights books. She also said that although my characters are normally three-dimensional, Eden and Beck were only two and three-quarters.
Don’t get me wrong, I have one of the most fabulous editors in the world, and she pushes me to grow and write better books. She wasn’t wrong in her assessment. I was just in the wrong frame of mind to digest it that night.
So what did I do?
I sat at my desk and cried. And then drank wine.
After I drank and cried, it took me an entire month of revisions to fix Problems in Paradise to a place close to how it was ultimately published. The biggest hurdles to making Paradise a better book was just moving past my ego (the me that wanted to think I got things right the first time around), asking for input from my editor and my critique partners, and sitting my ass down in the chair for some very hard work.
So for those of you who’ve told me Paradise is your fave book in the series so far, I can’t tell you how much that means to me. It means every minute of that hard work, those tears, and many gulps of wine were totally worth it!
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Today is National Penuche Fudge Day. Sounds delicious if you like fudge, which sadly, I don’t. It’s just too-too. Too sugary. Too rich. Yeah, yeah, please don’t take my Southern card away. Do you love fudge? If so, what’s your fave kind?
