So, Ron – I can hear you asking this question – why did you wait until the day before the deadline to get started?

Ha! I have an answer. Because the day of the deadline I had other stuff to do. Like commute 100 miles to work – barefoot – in the snow – uphill both ways. [OK that last part is Bovine Scatological material, it’s only partly uphill both ways.]

Anyway, that day in fourteen hours of hell taught me an important lesson. I’ve got to get faster at making stuff up. [Better yet to take one of Pam McCutcheon’s synopsis classes.]

To top it off, that fourteen-hour exercise showed me that I did indeed have some holes in the story. Nothing major, but the synopsis exercise coupled with a conversation I had at Pikes Peak Writers Conference with a major thriller-writer-guy planted the seed of a new plot line to make the story a lot more interesting. Bottom line is that the entry went in as is and the next morning I began a massive rewrite on the project. [We’ll ignore the fact that I’d told an agent a few weeks earlier “You bet, done and all ready to go.”]

Three hundred rewritten pages later, the manuscript was “in the mail.” [email whew!] I have a new book underway, and ten minutes to update my blog.

ttfn, Ron