Laurie R. King

As the final pass of Pirate King through my hands comes nearer—the galley proofs will reach me in a couple or three weeks—the next book begins to stir into life.  This week I will take the first steps in a book that won’t become a reality for the rest of the world for a year and a half.  For me, it becomes a reality this week.

Now, this may astonish some of you who have never read these posts or listened to me talk about writing, but: Laurie King doesn’t outline.  Beyond the main characters and the place, I never know what a book is going to be until I write it—and even then, I have to burrow into the rewrite before I’m at all certain.

This makes writing a detailed proposal…tricky.

I’m fortunate, to have an editor who trusts me and will back me to the hilt.  It saves us from the farce of my coming up with some lengthy fantasy description of the book to come, which both of us know bears no resemblance with what the book will end up being.

Once upon a time, in the glory days of publishing when advances had zeros on them and telephones were used for phone calls, I handed in a book proposal that amounted to a handful of lines—more or less as a joke, you understand.  If they accepted those few lines as the proposal, it would mean they would send me a check for roughly a thousand dollars a word.  And they accepted it.  The funny thing was, those few lines made a very accurate outline of the book—as it then stood in my mind.

But that was a game that’s amusing once.  There’s less humor in publishing these days.  And I love my editor enough that I don’t really want to give her problems.  So this week, I’ll sit down at my laptop and write a lengthy fantasy of what the book will look like, even though she and I both know full well that the proposal and the book will veer dramatically apart by the end of the first page.

Lengthy, as in: maybe as much as a whole page.