How do you feel about your summer time? For many folks, summertime evokes visions of vacations, water sports and relaxation. For me, summer is a great time for writing. The warmer months seem to accelerate inward goals that often get lost in the distractions of public commitments associated with the academic calendar.
The summer of 2024 has been devoted to a daunting project of combing through and curating a section of manuscript that went missing when I made the shift from PC to Mac fifteen years ago. Seventy thousand words belonging to what I had hoped would become a novel, and even more Templar history research notes, descended into the underworld of the cloud.
For years, I sporadically searched, trying to keep faith that my Templar history research would surface when I needed it. I wrote the first two books of the Temple Chronicles, wondering how I would finish the series without the missing narrative and notes.
But several months ago, they surfaced and I felt the time had come for the arduous yet rewarding task of gathering and braiding these texts into an outline. By summer, the vast word count stared me down… Either I had to divide the remaining narrative into another two books, or begin carving…cutting, splicing.
By early summer, I had mapped out a way to bring it all under one roof, so to speak, into one narrative. And the rest of the summer has been one giant quilting bee of piecing scenes, snipping loose phrases, fusing research into dialogs, embroidering action over history, and even appliquéing historic figures and events into all the layers. I have spent this summer pouring over minute details, to the point of wearing stronger readers to wrestle with the comas and quotation marks. But I am grateful, relieved and proud that my manuscript for Book 3 is taking firmer shape.
SO CHEERS to the summer of rewrites and also to my prodigal manuscript!
Happy Summer’s end to all my readers and starry friends!
