I’ve been working as hard as I can on Secrets & Promises, the fifth story in the Haven’s Realm saga. Babysitting my toddler grandson takes a lot of my time and energy, but I want you to know that I’m on the last ten pages, and almost ready to put this one to bed.
Editing this story proved challenging in many ways. When it was first published, the story included two romances, both tied at the beginning and end. But I heard more than one reader complain about getting confused over the book’s layout–changing from one set of characters to the other in a back and forth cycle. After my publisher closed her doors, I took a fresh look at Secrets and decided to break the two stories apart.
At first, that seemed an easy task, until I realized that Vincent’s story was painfully incomplete. There were details left out that the first-time reader may not understand, conversations that contradicted previous information, a lot of fluff and unnecessary introspect, and worst of all, no final, satisfying conclusion. After stripping Rudy from the prose, I had around 75,000 words to work with. In my initial rework to fill in gaps, I brought it up to 99,000, but a lot of it on review didn’t make sense to me.
So I cleaned it up, made better sense of every conversation, and filled in the gaps in Community culture to help the story stand alone. The final word count will be over 104,000, closer to average with the previous stories, though the number of words isn’t as important to me as their quality. I think it reads much better. I hope you’ll agree. Keep watching–I should be able to set this one free in the next month or two.
Happy reading!
Tamara Monteau, author, Haven’s Realm
