Victoria James Talks About Revisions

Author Victoria James is talking to us on a subject...ahem...we all have a love/hate relationship.

Victoria says...

I always knew I wanted to be a writer and in grade five, I penned my first story, bound it (with staples) and a cardboard cover and did all the illustrations myself (if you’ve ever seen my drawings you’ll know how horrible they must have been.  I still draw stick figures).  Luckily, this book will never see the light of day again.

In high school I fell in love with historical romance and then contemporary romance.  After graduating University with an English Literature degree, I married my own hero, pursued a degree in Interior Design and then opened my own business.

After the birth of our first child, I knew it was time to fulfill the dream of writing romantic fiction.  I’m a hopeless romantic who is living my dream, penning happily-ever-after’s for my characters in between managing kids and the family business.  Writing on a laptop in the middle of the country in a rambling old Victorian house would be ideal, but I’m quite content living in suburbia with my husband, our two young children, and very bad cat.

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Over to Victoria now...

A labor of love: Revisions

If someone had asked me a year ago, how I liked the revision process I’d say I hated it. That’s because at that time I’d only just had my first book, The Billionaire’s Christmas Baby hit the virtual shelves a few months prior. The terror of my first real revisions was still fresh in my mind. But now, with my latest book The Rancher’s Second Chance about to be released; I can say without a doubt, revisions have become one of my favorite aspects of the publishing experience.

I’m not really sure when or how this happened. It took a while, that’s for sure. Don’t get me wrong, receiving a revision email filled with notes still fills me with intense anxiety (open email, scan editor’s words briefly, shut email and head hits desk). That happens. Every. Time. An hour or so later, I’ll look at the email again, this time reading closely. At that point I can grudgingly admit that the letter makes lots of sense.

The next step for me is opening up the manuscript and tackling the bigger, broader issues. This is after about a day where I process, daydream, and come up with a vague idea of how I’m going to proceed. Oh, an email has usually gone out at this point to a writing friend, begging for some moral support.

Once I’ve gone through the entire manuscript, addressed my editor’s main concerns, the book goes back and I anxiously await my destiny….Round Two. This stage is usually where the magic happens and I’m asked to add in a scene here or there, or change the order of certain scenes. This does involve some intense work, but by the end of this stage I can see a HUGE change in my manuscript.

Round Three, things get a lot more fun. Now, the major changes have been made and it’s more fine-tuning. I love this…then the manuscript gets copy-edited and then the final stage is the galley. I do tend to panic at the galley stage because it’s my last chance to change any wording or find any repetition, etc. It’s hard to finally let go of the manuscript and say you’re ready to send it out to the world…

The true magic happens during the editing stage of the book. This is something I can say for certain. All the angst, the work, the doubt that happens during the revision stage is so worth the end result!

Victoria has a new book out:

Widowed rancher Cole Forrester is all about running his family's ranch and guarding his heart. The last thing he's looking for is love, but when his little sister can't make it home to handle some of her wedding details, he's forced to entertain the event planner, Melanie Simms. Melanie is everything he's not even remotely interested in: she's high-society, complicated, and high maintenance. But when he's stranded with her at his remote cabin in the Colorado mountains, he realizes he's seriously underestimated her. She's hiding something about her past from him, but despite everything, he finds himself falling for the last woman he ever expected, and the first woman to make him want to give his heart and risk everything...

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Enter this Goodreads Giveaway to win signed copies of Victoria's book!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

A Risk Worth Taking

by Victoria James

Giveaway ends March 10, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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