Since my last post I’ve made progress.

In July I attended the the Romantic Novelists Association’s 2019 Conference in Lancaster. Upon my return it was back to work on the novel.

With the rewriting my second draft word count doubled, I added the majority of the missing scenes and expanded the sub-plots.

As my deadline for submitting my manuscript to the RNA’S New Writers’ Scheme was midnight on the 31st August, I was putting in long hours at my desk last month.

The last four days alone were taken up by importing the first nine chapters that were written in Word into Scrivener, then checking through the whole document to correct a couple of contradictions that had crept into the later chapters when I’d written the opposite in the earlier chapters.

For example, my heroine claims to have never met her aunt who lives in Oxford, but earlier in the story she says she’s only met her a few times… simple enough to change when I reached that point in reading through.

I hope I didn’t miss removing any query comments- anything I needed to check I put in brackets at that stage in the text.

My manuscript and synopsis were submitted early in the morning of the last day for submissions to the scheme, after another check through.

Now it’s the wait to be notified of the reader’s comments. With the submission having been so close to the deadline, I’m not expecting the notification of the reader’s report being ready, until the end of the year.

I do have my own list of what I know will need doing in the next draft, including sorting those of my hero’s servants with surnames beginning with ‘H’…

There’s more hard work ahead, but I am looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, next on the list is the website revamp…

 

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