Leave the Book Be; Return to it in a New Season

The best thing that we can do for our books-in-progress is to let them be for a long while—to return to them in a new season, with a fresh eye. This is what I will now be doing with Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial novel due out from Egmont next fall. The book has been in the hands of my trusted editor, Laura Geringer, for a spell. It's been safe with her. Percolating. Late last night she sent along her thoroughly well-considered notes. Think about this, she says. Consider that.

It is time now to collect my courage and to look back on that story—time to wrestle with myself. It's the final leg of story making, my last chance, the time to put it all on the line. To make the hard decisions. To throw away the pretty sentence, the hard-won research, the tangent that takes the reader nowhere. To throw away, and then go deeper.

A passage from the many that I'll be mulling:

Katherine turns her head east and looks out upon the spires, rooftops, bridges, and factories of Philadelphia, her city. The red brick and white lintel and brownstones and green swaths and temples of home, work, religion, pause. It is flat-roofed and hunkered. It is peaked and pompous. It is congested and incomplete, and Katherine’s eyes cannot possibly hold it all, until finally they settle on the dark bracelet of the Schuylkill River, which arrives from the north, pools and calms, before hurrying away with itself. Cure yourself, she thinks. Look away. But she cannot. Winter returns. February 6th. The day that she lost Anna.