Grace

I haven't written about the new book (Grace) here at all...and I just realized I have now been working on it steadily for over a year. That's a good long time. You'd think I'd be nearing the finish line. But for me, at this stage of the game is when I start second-guessing every sentence. This morning (SATURDAY), I woke up at 5 a.m. in a near panic attack about it. And so I got up, and started to read it from the beginning, trying to pretend that someone else wrote it. Didn't work.

This is my seventh novel (actually ninth if you count all of the ones I've written), and I keep wondering if I will ever get to a point where this sort of crazed insecurity phase of the process disappears.

Here is what I do know. I have two weeks until the next draft is due to my editor. This week I will comb through it again...character by character, tinkering, fixing, and probably freaking out. I will hopefully get it to the point where I can bear to let it go. And then I will hope and wait and try to breathe.