It took years – literally! But I finally have the title for my selkie novel!

I will, of course, continue to wonder if this is the right title. But I’ve been fretting about this since I started working on this story, so why stop now? 🙂

The working title was originally The Selkie and the Sidhe, but it quickly became clear that I’d have to come up with something else. I found an awful lot of people aren’t clear what a selkie is, much less a Sidhe. And as I worked on the manuscript, I realized that title wasn’t a good fit anyway. But it was incredibly difficult to come up with something that fit – and that I liked. I now have a list of titles I liked that didn’t fit, so I’m saving them for future stories. And finally – just two days ago – I came up with the final title:

I sent that to my cover artist, Kathleen Lynch of Black Kat Design, this morning, so there’s no going back now!

Okay, so I could change my mind … but I’m not going to. This was a horribly grueling process. I would rather spend my energy writing the next book!

Since I vastly underestimated the amount of work I had to do on this novel, I not only have a fair bit of editing left, I also managed to have my editing time overlap with classwork I’m doing for a writing workshop I’m going to in about a month. I have two more short stories to write for this class, and then I’ll be able to concentrate all of my writing time on the novel. In the meantime, I’m squeezing in tiny chunks of time, but coming up with an entirely new short story every week takes a lot of time and energy.

I’m an optimist, so I’ve decided to look at this as a good lesson. I had never really paid attention to how much time writing takes, but now that I’m working hard at being as efficient and as productive as possible, it’s become brutally obvious that things take way longer than I thought. For example, my guess is that I’m spending 8-16 hours on each of these short stories, including planning/research time. I’ve also realized that just having a complete draft of a novel doesn’t mean I can whip out the final edits in a month. Seriously – what was I thinking?!?!? I’m very meticulous and detailed, and I go over my manuscripts multiple times because that’s how I write – but going over and over a novel-length manuscript takes a lot of time even when you’re not rearranging scenes or anything major. So … now I know better!

On a totally different topic, I’m celebrating Jasper’s anniversary! Three years ago I drove 8 hours each way to adopt him. He’s a fantastic little guy – and, coincidentally, the inspiration for the dog in Entangled by Midsummer. 🙂 We celebrated two years with Rosie last month – and yes, I drove 8 hours each way to get her too!