If Book Two Were a Car

My mom asked me today how edits on Molly Chase Book Two are going.

“I'm at the, ‘car engine is pulled apart and the parts are all over the garage floor, and I'm not sure how to put it back together,’ stage,” I told her. This morning I woke up in a panic, wondering if I spent yesterday's fifteen hour workday doing the exact thing my editor (Karen Ullo) told me not to do. Once caffeinated, I realized that I am doing what Karen wants me to do, but it involves replacing several car parts and making several extra trips to the auto parts store... and...

For context: I have drafts of this book dating back to 2017, several years before Book One (In Pieces) was acquired for publication and substantially revised. Revisions on One necessitated revisions to Two. This story has been through so many drafts, I've lost count. I have old material, I have new material, I have material I have yet to write, and I have material I wrote and subsequently lost. I have the darlings I've kept, the darlings I've killed, and the darlings I have yet to kill.

And I now have Karen's edits to incorporate, which one might liken to souping-up the engine: it's great, so long as I can modify the suspension, brakes, and steering to match.

“Mom,” I said, “if this book was a car, it would be the one in that Johnny Cash song. ‘Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56, '57, '58, ‘59 automobile...’”

She thought that was pretty funny.