Each Christmas a dear friend gives me an Amaryllis in bloom. The flower dies in six weeks or so, but the long green leaves decorate my windowsill until the fall. Then, in an act of great faith, I cut off all the leaves, shake the bulb out of its nest of dirt, and throw it into the fridge. It waits there for me, for at least a month, until I put it back where I found it. Then I wait for another eight weeks, hoping that the magic will still work. If I’m lucky, I get the photo above. If I’m very lucky, I get better: more flowers, more bulbs.

It’s a lot of waiting and lot of hoping. It’s taking drastic steps, damaging something that I know is working because I believe I can get better. I value the final flower enough to risk killing the plant. I don’t even pretend to know how bulbs form in the wild, how they work when there is no refrigerator. I take it on faith that the people who guide me know what they’re doing.

I’m editing now – somewhere between my second and fifth formal round of edits, depending on how you count. My time was not my own this fall, and so my Amaryllis bloomed late, in January instead of December. They sit on the window by my desk, and reassure me that my edits, which require just as much faith, will turn out. I hope they’re right.

If that proved too difficult, my backup topic was the way October always leaves me feeling as scattered as the golden and red foliage on the sidewalk, with my energy going to a dozen different places and making almost no difference in any of them. A few paragraphs devoted to how October always feels like New Year’s Eve to me, a time to make resolutions, to assess the damage of the year before and to promise never to do any of it again. October is my time for cutting back and saying no.

Those were my plans. They were good ones even, and maybe some week I’ll get back to them, but something arrived in my inbox that pushed everything else out of my mind: the Art department at Tor books requested cover concepts for my first novel.

Like most would-be authors, I’ve imagined my name on the cover of a book, specifically a paperback book, at least a million times. I’ve picked fonts, auditioned characters for the front space, and decided on colors. It would be a lie to say I’ve stuck with any of those for very long. I posses only a tiny bit of artistic talent, and I doubt myself often. Deep inside I can’t wait to see what a real artist will do.

I collect vintage noir mysteries. The easiest ones to find come from famous authors, Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Raymond Chandler. I love the evolution of the images, in the 1930s a woman has long flowing hair, in the 1970s the same character wears her tresses shellacked into submission. Up until now my characters lived solely in my imagination. I’m excited to see how they look in someone else’s.

With that uncertainty I’m not sure how to move forward. The life-cycle of a manuscript for me is:

• 3 to 4 months takes a story from idea to first draft manuscript
• 3 weeks from draft manuscript to polished
• Off to my thoroughly awesome Beta readers, who are completely worth their weight in gold.
• Back from the Beta readers, the manuscript gets another three to four week edit.
• At this point it’s polished enough to go to my agent.
• My agent (Love her!) usually has a few comments, so there’s another editing period.
• Back to my agent the manuscript begins its trip to the publishing houses.

The trick is, these steps don’t happen in a vacuum. While manuscript 1 (MMS1) is with the Beta readers, manuscript 2 (MSS2) begins the journey. I never edit a story immediately after I’ve finished it, it needs time to rest. The writing cycle looks a little bit like this:

Month 1 to 4: MSS1 is written.
Month 5: MSS1 rests. MSS2 begins.
Month 8: MSS2 wraps up. Begin editing MSS1
Month 9: MSS1 goes off to Beta Readers. Begin MSS3.
Month 12: Wrap up MSS3. Begin Editing MSS2.  MSS1 comes back from Beta and gets in line behind MSS2.

(repeat until MSS100, at which point I intend to take a trip around the world.)

This year hasn’t gone exactly according to plan. Looking back at my writing journal I can reconstruct my writing work this year to be:

• Jan to March: MSS1 (which I’d begun a year ago and lost interest in)
• April to August: MSS2
• August: edits to Waking Up Dead
• September: Uh… Umm… let me get back to you on that.

I’d like to complete the very rough first draft of another manuscript before the end of the year. Three manuscripts a year feels like I’m taking my writing seriously and doing a good job. MSS2, which I wrapped up in early August, is off with a Beta reader, so it’s on track. MSS1 is off with my agent, so it’s on track. So right now (literally at this very instant) I should be starting a new story. (Waits for inspiration.) (Nothing comes.) But really, shouldn’t I hold off on starting something new until I know I won’t be forced to set it down for more work on Waking Up Dead?  Or should I take this downtime to work on promoting Waking Up Dead, or should I be doing…. Some other great thing some one on the internet will suggest right now? Please?

September 2007: Waking up in a very swish room at the Walt Disney World Contemporary Resort, a scene came to me: Elisabeth Hicks, war veteran and detective, at a party with a beautiful woman (who looked a bit like this) who wants her to do a dangerous job. I wrote furiously, for two hours before check out, through the ride to the airport, and into the hour before boarding my plane to head home.

December 2007: I picked up the scene again, and decided I had to know how Hicks got to that party. I started with page one, and wrote my way up to it, then past it as the New Year turned. At the end of January 2008, I’d finished the first draft.

I spent 2008 working closely with an editor in the hopes of getting a contract for another manuscript I’d written. The editor requested major revisions, and I spent most of my time on then, taking breaks here and there to polish the Hicks story.

March 2009: The editor I’d worked with for nearly a year rejected the manuscript. She asked if I had anything else to show her and I sent the revised and newly named Waking Up Dead manuscript.

June 2009: I got a contract offer for Waking Up Dead. I took the contract to a local attorney who is also an agent. She advised me to shop the work around, saying “if you get one offer, you’ll get others”. I attended my first writers’ conference just a week later, and learned enough to write my first query letters.

November 2009: Waking Up Dead got me my agent.

March 2010:  I got the phone call from my agent that two editors were interested in Waking Up Dead. Delighted I set to work on the background materials they requested. Then I waited. And waited some more.

July 2010: Contract negotiations began with one of the editors.

March 2011: The contract was finalized!

August 2011: And now I’m starting on the edits. Opening up a document with a plethora of comments and line edits is enough to make anyone feel lost but I followed some advice from a great author and started with the easy ones. I dealt the grammatical changes in a few days. Now it’s time for the hard work, the ‘brain surgery’ where a scene from day 10 in the story moves to day four, and the tough decisions, like whether or not to add a B-plot or to cut two characters that I loved.

There’s the work, and then there’s the nagging voice of self-doubt. If I change enough little things, do I change the over-all tone of the story? I worry that the voice of my favorite characters is getting mixed up with my editor’s voice. I fret I’m taking too long. I fret I’m not taking long enough. I’ve switched to reading my way through, starting with page one, instead of just going through addressing the comments. I’m hoping that will help.

Ironically, at my day job I’m known for never caring about what I look like, never wearing make up, and literally wearing the same shoes 5 days a week. (They live in my bottom desk drawer. I commute in the purple sneakers.) There are three times in my life when clothing becomes a concern:

• When I’m presenting myself as an author
• When I’m dressing my characters
• DragonCon, MarsCon, and other conventions

As convention season approaches there’s no way my blog won’t be littered with references to costumes, pithy t-shirts, and packing woes. The clothing challenges I face as an author are a bit more hidden.

Clothes communicate who a person is, and to some extent what their priorities are. In Waking Up Dead, the main character, Elisabeth Hicks, is fresh out of the Army and hasn’t re-integrated herself into normal society yet. Her clothes show just how little of an effort she’s willing to make: jeans and long sleeve t-shirts. The long sleeves hide her scars, the jeans let her blend in with everyone else. I had no trouble dressing her in old Army shirts, the occasional tee with writing on it, and generally boring clothes.

A much harder challenge came from the vampire Elisabeth is searching for through out the novel. Josephine was born in 1797, who became a vampire in 1814.  I imagined her somewhere between Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons and a modern Parisian fashion model. After far too many Google image searches I decided to base her wardrobe on actress Rebbeca Gayheart. She even wears this dress in the second novel, Hollywood Dead.

With the secondary characters I got to be a bit more creative. I made Elisabeth’s younger sister, Gina, a fan of Sophia Loren, so I could imagine the kind of classically beautiful clothes I love. The men in the novel wear a wardrobe of romance cover classics, from tight jeans with button downs to Regency era shirts with a sprinkle of the standard black leather pants that hug them in all the right places. In short, they’re dressed in all the outfits that make men look yummy. I took my research (looking at male models, checking out hot guys in clubs, reading men’s magazines) very seriously.

Almost as seriously as I took my own outfit hunting for that meeting in New York, I’ve invested approximately eight hours now. There are new shoes, a new dress, and a small truckloads worth of new accessories. As I expected, imagining the prefect outfit for someone else is tons more fun than actually procuring something for myself, but I suspect most authors feel that way.