S.G. Browne

So I’m doing my first round of edits on my novel and although the suggestions by my editor are, for the most part, benign, there are a few places where she suggests that I delete phrases or sentences that I am in love with.

Enamored.

Infatuated.

They make me laugh, these lines.  They make me giggle.  They make me wonder how anyone could even think about excising them from my manuscript.  But after taking the lines out and putting them back in and reading them out loud over and over and over with and without the edits, I realize my editor is right.  These lines are not necessarily enhancing my story but distracting from the relevant prose.

As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put it:  “Whenver you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.  Murder your darlings.”

So I’m off to New York tomorrow to do some research for the novel I just completed and to meet my agent, Michelle Brower of Wendy Sherman Associates, and my editor, Laura Swerdloff of Broadway Books.

To be honest, I still find this whole “getting my book published” a bit surreal.  Imagine something you’ve been working toward for most of your adult life, 18 years of it, anyway, and then suddenly, you’re flying to New York to meet your agent and editor.

Suddenly is obviously a relative term.  After all, human beings didn’t suddenly appear on the planet (unless, of course, you live in Kansas) and corpses don’t suddenly decompose.  But when you’ve been writing for 18 years and you’ve spent 15 months looking for an agent and you’ve got 82 responses saying “Thanks but no thanks” and then the 83rd tells you she loves your book in November and two months later you’re offered a contract by an imprint of Random House, then suddenly becomes appropriate.

Before I know it, my novel is suddenly going to be in bookstores.  Bizarre.

So here it is. The first official post. The post-contract-signing, pre-book-delivery entry into my newborn website’s blog.

I have to say that signing the contract for Breathers was both daunting and thrilling. The first two times I read through the 13 pages of the contract, I was looking for all of the questions I had and the legal ramifications of what I was about to do. After all, it’s not often you sign away the rights to something you’ve created.

And while I know that 7.5% is the standard royalty rate for trade paperback, especially for a first-time novelist, it’s an odd feeling to sign over the North American print rights of your creation knowing that 92.5% of the gross sales will be going to someone else.

But the third time I read through the contract, it finally sunk in what I was about to do. I was about to sign a contract for Breathers, the first step toward publication and the realization of a dream more than 15 years in the making. So the third time, I smiled and laughed a lot. And then I signed the contract.

People keep asking me if I feel any different now that I have an agent and a book deal.

Yes and no.

When I walk past bookstores, instead of just envisioning my novel on the shelves, I can actually see it. I smile at the thought of seeing it in the New Arrivals section or displayed in the window next to a sign announcing an upcoming book reading and signing with the author. So yeah, there’s that.

And while it’s true that I don’t have to spend the time looking for an agent, there’s still that one thought in the back of my head that helps to keep me grounded:

I hope my agent likes my next book.