I willing acknowledge that my “creative process” is a long and winding road, taking many varied and assorted detours between concept and completion.
Between the time I first thought about Book One in my Cozy Mystery series until I wrote “The End” on the fourth draft, a whopping decade and a half passed. Finally, it was time to put up or shut up, and I decided to put up.
Last night I finished re-reading the first book in this series, set here on the Long Beach Peninsula. I made only a tiny few tweaks to punctuation and minor sentence structure, and I’m leaving the rest of it alone. I’m satisfied that it’s as good as I can possibly write.
Obviously, it’s time to get the wheels moving for Book Two, hoping against hope that I will manage to complete this one in less than 15 years!
Using visualization, I began to think about what the finished product will look like. But since I’m best at visualizing what I can actually see, I spent nearly a full day creating a mock-up of my idea of what the actual cover might look like. Far from distracting me, I am now more inspired to get my butt moving to fill those pages.
I printed off the imagined cover and posted it on the wall behind my computer, next to the one I created for Book One, and began focusing my energy. Next, I created a new folder on my desktop, and boldly titled it: BIP (Book in Progress).
And away we go!
