Author Time Warp

by Sara Rosett

The doorbell rang last week and I found a cardboard box delivered courtesy of UPS on my porch.

I frowned. I wasn’t expecting any packages.

 I dragged it inside and saw the label from Kensington books, my publishing house. It wasn’t that time, was it? I trotted off to check my calendar and found that it was, indeed, that time. The paperback version of Mimosas, Mischief, and Murder had released that week.

How had a missed this important event? I’d been caught in the author time warp.

For the last few weeks, I’d been deep in the final draft of my current work-in- progress, the eighth Ellie book, which is set on the Florida Gulf Coast and involves a missing person, celebrities, the paparazzi, and a murder that is mistaken for suicide. My head was full of majestic oaks dripping with Spanish moss, Southern plantations, and emerald beaches. I tend to have tunnel vision as I near the end of the first draft of a book and I hadn’t even thought about Mimosas since I finished the page proofs for the paperback ages ago.

I wrote Mimosas in 2009. The hardcopy version was published last April. It takes place in Alabama and involves a Southern book festival, missing funeral caskets, lost letters from a reclusive author, and a tight-knit Southern family. It was a fun book to write, but when I opened the box and looked at the cover, all I could think was that it felt like I’d written it about five years ago.

Time moves at a glacial pace in publishing. It takes about a year for me to write a book and about a year for it to move through the publishing process. Then, throw in the year between the hardcover and the paperback and add the fog of finishing a first draft, and it’s no wonder that poor Mimosas slipped my mind. Things are changing in publishing. Ebooks have sped things up considerably, but there is still a delay between when I finish the book and when it will be out.

I don’t know if I’ll ever adjust to the crazy world of writing where the book I’m immersed in won’t be read for years and the book that is “out” seems like a distant memory.

Today, though, I’m basking in the “completed first draft” glow (of #*8—no title yet) and can focus much better on Mimosas (#6). I’ll be giving away several copies today. Comment at Girlfriends Book Club to be entered in the drawing.

~Sara

P.S. Only four months until Mistletoe, Merriment, and Murder (#7) is released Oct 1. Putting it on my calendar now. 

In Red. 

With little stars around it…