I asked earlier this week what you thought of the phrase “You had better leave. Before we both wake up regretting what we’ve done.” Most of you came to the same conclusion as I did when I first read the phrase – it might be the beginning of a romance. The other most common answer was there would be a sexual encounter that would destroy their friendship. Actually, neither my expectations after reading the phrase were met nor were any of your answers. That’s why I raised the question earlier this week about what you thought the phrase meant.
They appeared in the novel I was reading, which I won’t name for obvious reasons. The two characters where this phrase came from were a man and a woman who were what I’d call main supporting characters. I immediately thought I was in for a subplot in the novel about these two characters. When I reached the end of the story, nothing more happened between them. I’ll call them Dick and Jane. I was so disappointed in the ending with no resolution for Dick and Jane that I went back and reviewed every scene with them in it.
I don’t believe the writer meant that leave us hanging how about Dick and Jane. I think it happened in editing the novel. Most novels, regardless of their genre, will have somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words in them. Many novelists find they overshoot the word count desired by publishers, and in the editing process, they need to delete whole scenes or other things like long descriptions of something or someone. I think the author of this novel did initially have a subplot with Dick and Jane in it. When they removed it in the editing process in the editing process, they missed this two-sentence phrase.
The other critical fact about this novel is it was published on Amazon for the Kindle market. For that market, you upload the book in a specific format. There is no review process like there would be with a traditional publisher, so errors do creep in despite the best efforts of authors. There are people you can hire to edit your novel, but for a beginning writer, that may not be financially possible, and you already had to hire someone to design a cover for your book. Because Amazon has such a large percentage of the market, you cannot afford not to publish there.
I thought you might like a peek into the life of an author today. It is not like the old days when you could query a publisher or agent to get your work published. Both these days require a “track record” of publishing success before they’re likely to consider you. There was a time when both publishers and agents looked down on self-published authors, but that is changing today.
