Placing your final period on a novel is all at once enthralling and heartbreaking. Enthralling because you did it — you finished it — and heartbreaking because you leave your characters behind. Each time I finish a project, I experience a real sense of loss, the same one I feel when I finish reading a great novel. But if you’ve done your job well as a writer, when you leave your characters, all is well again in their lives. They don’t need you to make them better or stronger.
Ghostboy, Chameleon, & the Duke of Graffiti is going through the second wave of edits. I’ve handed it over to two talented writers who are going to make it cleaner by pulling out the fluff (the chapters that don’t advance the story) that I haven’t been able to part with and catching the typos. Then the manuscript is off with select beta readers, and then I’ll make the final edits. The whole process takes about one month.
In the meantime, I’ve queried some agents to get the ball rolling. A few have already requested more material, which is good, but whether or not I get an agent won’t change much in terms of the future of this book. It will be published. You will get to read Duke’s story. You will get to live Jaime’s adventures. You will get to feel Cora’s heart thumping when she falls in love.
Ghostboy is based on a difficult topic (child cancer), but I don’t delve on the sickness. I explore unexpected friendships and deep love, dark secrets and real loss. And the book ends with HOPE. See quote in the picture.
It all started when I watched The Fault In Our Stars on pay-per-view this summer with my husband. I cried from beginning to end, and I don’t mean two tears plopping out, but great big sobs. It made me think about life, about family; it made me remember to enjoy each and every moment; and it also made me realize that I wanted to help others with my writing.
From my muggy San Francisco hotel room, looking out over the thick smog that blankets the city in the early morning, I contacted Make A Wish Foundation. At the time, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do and explained it to them as best I could: write stories for terminally-ill children in which they were the superhero or the princess or the warrior or the ballerina, through which they lived out the great adventures they didn’t have the time or the energy for. I realized after my phone call that I needed to reflect on the logistics of this project and thus wrote a book about it.
Right now, it’s fiction, but I hope to turn into a reality and discover true little superheroes and princesses.