milestone of the month

Yesterday, at what felt like long last, I got revision notes back from my editor at Beacon. Lo and behold, they were well worth waiting for, and did NOT include the sentence that—irrationally, perhaps—I had feared most: um, yeah, thanks, but we can’t publish this crap…

So! Leaving this Ohio interlude tomorrow to go back to Montana, driving four days cross-country, then holing up to host a week’s vacation with my sister and nieces near Bigfork, then buckling back down for a month of grinding out revisions, edits, rewrites and cuts under what looks, at first and second glance, to be very competent direction. It’s always been something of a dream for me to work on something big with a smart editor looking over my shoulder (not your typical writerly fantasy,  perhaps, but as a smart editor myself, I may be more amenable to the value of a good edit than most).

And then, around the end of August, we’ll send it all off to the printer to generate galley proofs.

Galley proofs!