There is a long way to go

The first pictures of our baby look decidedly human, which is comforting. When we went for our twelve week scan the other day, we could see a heart beating, a little face, two legs and two arms waving.

But there is still a long way to go. Our baby is still only six centimetres long and though it looks somewhat like a little baby, it has a lot of growing to do. Hopefully, the rest of its body will one day be in proportion to its forehead, for example.

In a similar way, I made it to the end of my first novel, Wild Rose, in July 2010. It was 90,000 words long and aimed at the young adult market. Having submitted it to three literary agents with varying degrees of success, I started working informally with Shelley Instone
at the Eve White Literary Agency in November 2010. Shelley recommended that I edit the manuscript significantly to aim it at a younger age group and therefore to be no longer than 50,000 words.

The first time I saw the manuscript finished and printed off, it looked somewhat like a book. But there was a good deal of refinement to be done. The manuscript needed to be reduced - a bit like a sauce - so that it retained the essence of the story in a much more concentrated form.

Even this week, almost a year later, I have been making changes to two sentences in two separate chapters and if a publisher is found there will be more adjustments to make.

So while the book shrinks the baby grows. But for both, from the form they take at first, there is a long way to go.