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The 55 pages that I cut yesterday have put me back on the path. I know tomorrow’s chapter and the one after that, so the hard edit was the right move. But Merry has always written like this for me from the very beginning. I guess for me series characters are like any relationship the way you begin is the way you will end. What do I mean by that?

Anita came to be out of almost nowhere in the first short story. She was all muse-driven and speed. The first Merry book,  A KISS OF SHADOWS, was actually written twice. The first time through Ballantine, Merry’s publisher, had okayed it. They would have edited it and put it out there, but it sucked. It did. For another writer it would have been okay, maybe even great, but I knew I could do better. I knew I hadn’t nailed Merry’s voice, or her world. I’d turned the book in because the deadline was upon me, but I was deeply unhappy with it. 700 plus pages of unhappy, so when I got it back from the publisher I proceeded to rewrite it. Not to editorial order, but to my order. I just wasn’t willing to put my name on something that sucked that badly, by my standards. Are my standards high? Hell yes. I demand a lot from the people around me, but it’s nothing compared to what I demand of myself. So I decided on my own to do this massive rewrite. I fell back onto my original rules for writing a book that I’d used for the first four, or five books I ever wrote.

The 70/30 rule. It means that 70 % of any first draft is garbage and you need to throw it out, but to get that 30% of pure gold you have to write the whole 100% then winnow the gold from the dross. As I’d written more books my garbage quotient had gone down and my gold quotient up, but that was with an established series. I’d let arrogance trick me into thinking that everything would write that cleanly. It didn’t.

I threw out 70% of the first book and kept about 30% of it. Yeah, you read that right. I trashed that much of a 700 plus page book. The original book and the finished one are almost unrecognizable except for the first part of the mystery, and that Merry worked at Grey’s Detective Agency, and that Merry was a fairie princess hiding from her family. The supporting characters stayed the same but they were much changed in personality and interactions with Merry. My then editor at Ballantine agreed that it was a stronger book. Everyone was happier and the book speaks for itself. I’m still happy with it, and that’s a lot for me.

So, from the beginning it’s taken me more pages of false starts, wrong turns, to get to the meat of a Merry story than it has to do the same for Anita. I used to think it was because I wrote Anita in short story form first, the one published, "Those Who Seek Forgiveness," and many unpublished and unpublishable shorts. Yeah, probably I could get them published now, but trust me, they aren’t worth it. They are almost writing exercises where I explore the world and the characters. My literary fingernail clippings should stay where all fingernail clippings go in the trash.

But with this book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS, I had seven Merry books under my belt. I knew the world and the characters, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still had to write fifty-five pages of nonstarter before I could figure out where we needed to be and how to get there. I hadn’t had to do this in several books, but since book eight really almost begins another story arc for Merry, I guess in a way I was starting over with her. Sigh. But I’m finally excited about the book and eager to know more, and for me as a writer that is absolutely essential. Alone in my office it’s just an audience of one; me. If that first audience isn’t having fun or being intrigued or horrified or just plan scared then how can I make any of you feel those emotions later?