Taking time fo gravitas.

When I first finished "Eden's Return" I thought it was more or less ready for publication. After a quick rewrite.

Then I wondered if I shouldn't try harder to flesh out the philosophical underpinnings of the story. When I wrote it, I was doing it by feel, a sort intuitive mysticism. It felt right, though I'm not sure I could have explained it.

When I finally came back to the rewrite, I decided that keeping it vague actually worked in its favor. It was a slight book, only 52,000 words.

I set out to do a light rewrite, and then decided it needed to be at least 60K words, so I started looking for places to expand and flesh out.

I'm more than halfway through that process--which has been much, much slower than usual. I don't need to really have anything ready to publish for 4 or 5 more months, to give "Takeover" and "Deadfall Ridge" time to play out.

I ordered a book about Eden online, and Linda supplied another from her rather voluminous religious library. So I'm going to dip into those and see what I can use. Meanwhile, I also decided that the heroine of the story--who has been brought up alone by her mother--is a big Dickens fan, so much so that she has memorized his books. That will give me the excuse to drop some pertinent Dickens quotes into the story.

All of which meant I didn't turn over "Eden's Return" to my editor on September 1 as planned. Instead, I'm going to shoot for Oct. 1.

The story was good the way it was, but I'm trying to bring more gravitas to my writing, by researching and thinking and taking more time.