The Saga of Superbad Sheikh and…Where Are My Cookies?

I don’t know what just happened to me. I feel like my brain got zapped into a gelatinous goo. I blame Superbad Sheikh. So…I DO know what just happened to me!! Superbad SHEIKH happened!

This was not an easy book. Not even so much because it was emotional. I kind of WISH that’s why it was hard. It was more that, for some reason, it took me the whole book to really nail down what the HECK was up with Superbad. I mean, I knew in a sense. I knew how he was. But WHY he was that way kept changing on me.

I had this scene with him in the desert and it was meant to be SO angsty and it was him, roaring to the heavens and railing against the world because of the THING THAT HE HAD DONE. And I was like HECKS YEAH MAN!!! And one of my CPs read it and was like: That wasn’t IT was it?

O>O … well…no. I don’t supposed it was. DARN YOU, SUPERBAD SHEIKH!

So I had to go back and fiddle with that. And then as I got further in, I realized that I was still under serving the issue.

Part of the problem with this book, I think, was that I came at it with the external conflict being foremost in my mind. That’s partly because my editor asked me to write a duet with two books that shared a common theme, and partly because I got a hook in my head that I couldn’t quite shake. And while I managed to create the heroine all right, and not put the external stuff way before character, with the sheikh, I had a harder time.

He was a more closed off character, which didn’t help. He wasn’t putting it all on the page for me, the heroine OR the reader to see. For some reason, I just had a mental fog with him.

At about 47K I had a breakthrough. Pathetic, no? Then I went through the book and did some tweaking and it’s now been turned in at a whopping 53K which…for me is very long pre-revision.

This is going to be a serious, cookie-eating wait, my friends. I worked really hard at mining his conflict, and I THINK I found it, but it will be interesting to get my editor’s take on it and see if I went deep enough. It was an odd process, finding the story and then going through and, after all that groundwork was laid, finding the character. And because it worked that way, I had a hard time seeing how the pieces all formed one in the end.

Pass me the chocolate chip.

Fortunately, while I wait, I’ll have a lot to work on! I’m toying with the idea of another novella, and there will be, of course, another Presents in the works soon!

*eats cookies*