Author: leoniemack

What now? I submitted my full manuscript to Harlequin last week. For me, for now, that means it’s done. It’s over. It’s in the file. A couple of the scenes still run through my head occasionally, just to indulge. So where to next? I used my time yesterday plotting the next in the series after…

As I have started to plan work with a view to submitting it for publication, I have had to take a more critical eye to my ideas and how I would pitch them. If I can’t make it make sense in about two hundred words, it’s going to be hard to sell. This is especially…

Meg and Jon’s story is so much better with the revisions requested by Mills and Boon. I’ve edited it and left it and edited it and edited it when I should have left it and my eyes are permanently crossed. It’s hard. I have been writing since I was old enough to be able to…

Remember the days when your reading selection was contained in only one or two places, called either ‘bookstores’ or ‘the library’? Remember when you had to take a small, rectangular object to a counter and interact with a person in order to read a book? I remember celebrating the advent of self-checkout machines at my…

Meg and Jon’s story is coming along nicely. After winding up the tension between them by making their conflict nearly impossible to solve, it has made the few moments when they overcome it and start falling in love that much more satisfying. I’ve written nearly half of the manuscript and the full story has come…

So now Harlquin has lit a proverbial fire under my butt by requesting a full or partial manuscript of Meg and Jon’s story, I am spending every spare minute writing. It’s such a luxury to have the excuse. The feedback I received from the Harlequin editor was to make sure there was enough internal conflict…

I hate that my novels need titles. It’s not the creative process of naming the story that I dislike – sometimes that’s fun (although I have trouble resisting corny puns). It’s the reality that the title isn’t really up to me. It has to mean something to the reader. Add to that the fact that…

I’m going to enter into Harlequin/Mills and Boon’s Romance Blitz competition. There, I said it. I have everything ready: query letter, synopsis and first chapter. I’ve revived my Twitter, I’ve finally got my website up. But am I ready? I’m more ready than I was years ago when I finished my first novel (it still has some…

I’m finished. Well, I’m not. But I am. I have a 70,000 word novel which starts at the beginning and finishes at the end, with no holes. I still have to read through it all for continuity errors, but I should leave it alone for a week before I do that. It’s hard to leave…

I often can’t write if there is music in the background. I struggle to immerse myself in the scene and find the characters. But sometimes I love a soundtrack. I have always written stories in my head. Hundreds of couples have fallen in love in my head over the years. If I had a long…