So, having gotten my revision letter, I’m working on my revisions and I’ve put the new novel aside for now. In an ideal world, this would let it gel a little better so that I can come back to it with a firm idea of what to do with it next. I have too many experiences of getting distracted from novels midway through, but that is what a contract is for!

I’m very happy with my revisions. They fit into what I’ve already imagined in the world of Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad – tuning up some things that had been into the background, fleshing out some details, refining away what doesn’t fit as well as I thought it did. It is just plain fun going back to these characters!

So, I have revisions to do. By January-ish. And I have a synopsis due by April… and this is not a problem. Except that I don’t outline. I have to finish my first draft, and THEN outline. That could be a tight schedule.

It could be tighter since I need surgery on my hand.

So: when I’m planning my revisions, I’m going to try to continue working on my current WIP, if at a slightly slower pace. And when I’m actually implementing the revisions, I don’t mind taking some time off the current one. I will probably have to buckle down a good bit.

I don’t remember which of these things came first, although I remember quite vividly where I was.

(1) I had just discovered Netflix, so I’d been getting a bunch of foreign movies – especially Japanese action movies – that I’d always wanted to see. At the same time, I’d been listening to the soundtrack of Rent a great deal. I had not been having the kind of year you can measure in love. It turned out to be the kind of year you can measure in broken bones. (Two). So as I was doing my weekly walk to the grocery store, it hit me that someone should write a musical about ninjas. And it would have a song in it called “Seasons of Blood.” I briefly considered that I should write a musical about ninjas, but in fact I have no experience with live theater or songwriting.

(2) I got back from a 12-mile bike ride feeling happy and energized. As I pulled into my parking lot, it occurred to me that a girl riding her bike across the country would make a great YA novel. But I had to ask, what would make a girl ride her bike across the country? And what would make her parents allow it? It could be that they’re just criminally neglectful, but that’s not the book I wanted to write.

So, I kept pondering, and I didn’t want to do much more than ponder because I was also writing a thesis at the time. I slowly got an impression of a girl who was sad, and very alone in her sadness – who couldn’t talk to her friends about it, partly because they weren’t really her friends anyway, partly because she didn’t yet have words for what she was feeling.

I needed to give these friends who weren’t her friends something to do. And I needed to make the book not just a sad book, but something silly and sweet and lovely too. And I remembered my idea for Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad, and it just… came together.

And then it took two years of tears, sweat, and rewrites. It’s never as easy as it looks.