by Julie Coulter Bellon
Right before I had my baby, I got the evaluations back on my newest manuscript. Overall, they were mostly positive, and I was happy about that, but I do have some changes and rewriting to do.
This manuscript is one that is close to my heart. I have been researching it for well over a year and I love my main character and the situation he is put in. If any of you have read Dangerous Connections, this book is about Ethan Barak from that novel. Ethan is sort of my gray character, a mixture of good and bad, and he's had to decide whether the light or darkness within him is going to win. I honestly didn’t know if my readers/publisher would be interested in a novel where the main character isn’t exactly hero material and his actions have been less than stellar in the past. He’s a dark horse with a lot of issues and is thrown into an international incident that pushes him to his limits. I have to say that writing this character was a challenge and yet it was a joy as well, if that makes any sense. It’s been intriguing to see where this character and novel have gone since I started writing it.
But the evaluations I received also pointed out something that I’ve always had a problem with—my ending is too happy. So, I’ve been working on finding a happy medium, something not too depressing, yet not too happy either. It’s sort of hard for me because I’m a happy ending type of girl and in my opinion, you can get enough realism by watching the news and reading is my escape from all that. I guess I need to work a little harder at making things not quite so happy though. My job as the author seems to be to find a medium---not too happy and perfect, but not too dark, something that both my readers and I can live with---and I’m making progress.
I’m still trying to adjust to my new schedule as a mom of a newborn, but I find that my writing is calling to me, the ideas for my edits are flowing and begging to be written down. I’m going to do my best to indulge my writing passion while still balancing the rest of my life. It’s a problem every writer faces, but one that I wouldn’t trade. So far my balancing act today has consisted of reading some of my writing out loud to my baby and it put him to sleep, so then I got distracted by his sweet angelic little face, and I ended up putting the writing down to just gaze at him, probably with a goofy adoring look on my face.
I guess I’ll try the writing thing again tomorrow.
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