Anna DeStefano's Blog

My editor rocks! My revisions for Secret Legacy are already back, so you know what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks–besides watching my son graduate from middle school and talking with you guys (which I’ll be doing daily, no fooling, because I miss you too much to keep staying away). Where was I???

Oh, yeah, Secret Legacy is lovely (says the world’s BEST editor says), but there are some amazing suggestions, too, for making it an even more exciting read for fans. So begins the BEST part of my job–reworking a completed draft. Shaping it. Spinning turning points. Honing characters. Upping tension and conflict and the impact of every scene. Adding new ones that create richness and depth I couldn’t see while fighting to make the first draft work.

It’s a lot like life, revising a manuscript. I like to think we live out each decade with a playbook that continuously evolves., kind of like an outline for a book. We draft out our currently life, learn and grow, then as the years turn we see more and understand more and kick things up a notch into the next ten years or so. We work on who we are, what we do, how we live, and whom we expend our energy and experiences with. Just as we learn to deal with the crisis or conflict at hand, there’s a new level of tension waiting around the next corner. There’s no time for a total rewrite (not that we’d go back and start over, anyway), but there’s always our next chance to make everything that “is” work better and everything that “will be” as exciting and successful as possible… (more…)

“We write to taste life twice…” ~Anais Nin

I love this quote, even though it’s been a little while since I’ve tasted my life nearly as much as I’ve survived it. And tasting… Well, there’s something that sounds like thriving in the word. Something that’s gotten me thinking.

 There’s a lot of fight or flight in my work-in-progress. (Well, at least Secret Legacy was my WIP before December happened. ETA to getting back to Sarah Temple and the dreams that will either save or destroy her–Feb. 1st. . so stay tuned for upcoming dream theory posts.) A lot of fighting adversity and challenging limits and refusing to give up–this is a paranormal thriller series, right? But now that the Legacy world is built and it’s dream theory other-worldliness is grounded in its altered realty, I’m finding as I reread what’s already out of my brain and down on paper that there’s space for more in Book 2. More richness. More character. More…flavor.

My heroine in Dark Legacy spent the entire book running from danger and surviving a world of revelation crashing down on top of her. Her sister in Secret Legacy, I’ve known from the start will be running toward something instead of away.The twins’  conflict needs to ramp to the next level. They need the truth. Their legacy needs to become a future to fight for, not just a past to struggle against. But how to show that? How to make the reader feel the shift in the series??? Over the weekend, as I reflected on the last month and the next 11 to come and the revision I wanted in my own life, my good friend Anais reached out to me with the above quote. (more…)