In the Deeps of Winter Writing

Hello, everyone!

I hope you've all had a great week. I did, but unfortunately, I didn't do anything too interesting. I did get some good news, though! I got a good review from Kirkus!

But other than that, not much to report. It's winter, it's cold, and I've been working hard on both a set of edits for a new Jeremy Wilderson book and on my work in progress, a YA thriller.

I finished the work in progress, or at least, the first draft. Then I woke up the next morning and realized I hated my ending. So now I'm working hard on finishing the edits on the Wilderson book so I can send those back to my editor, and I'm working hard on the work in progress (the YA thriller, not Wilderson) so I can get it back to my writing group for critique notes. Then I guess I'll revise it.

I'm a writer. I write. That has never been as true as it is now.

So, deep in the midst of writing my YA thriller work in progress, I've had to make some hard choices. Namely, whether I should kill off a character who I rather like.

I was drawing up a revision plan and one character was giving me trouble. He needed to be present at the end, but if he was, he'd wreck the whole ending. So the little devil in my head said, "Kill him."

And I hate to admit it, but it solved all my problems to do it. I feel like a mob boss.

I still don't want to off this character if I can help it. I haven't killed a character before (the Jeremy Wilderson books are very much not those kind of stories).

I also don't like killing characters willy-nilly; I feel like there has to be a reason. But I can't avoid how well it works in the story, which is too good a reason to ignore. So I'm starting down the road to becoming that writer. You know the one.

Okay, so I'm not that bad. It's just one character. For now.


Here are the debuts this week (there are a lot of them!):

Middle Grade:
Ali Standish - The Ethan I Was Before (1/24)
Sally J. Pla - Someday Birds (1/24)

Young Adult:
Shalia Patel - Soulmated (1/24)
Kate Hart - After the Fall (1/24)
Tiffany Jackson - Allegedly (1/24)
E.S. Wesley - The Outs (1/24)
Natalie C. Anderson - City of Saints and Thieves (1/24)
Vic James - Gilded Cage (1/26)
Jeff Giles - The Edge of Everything (1/27)