A Teaser Chapter You Say?

I am excited to report that I’m currently putting the final touches on the second novel in my Clubmobile Girls series (look for a cover reveal on Diary of an Eccentric: Writings of an Eccentric Bookworm next week and on my social media thereafter).

So while many of us are experiencing trouble summoning our creative muse or focusing generally (count me in both camps), the tedium of inputting line edits provided the perfect (and productive) distraction from the news and my worries. I received my line edits in late February just as everyday life began to shut down for many of us. Aha! Line edits: this I can focus on. With far less to do in my other lines of work than typical, I was able to turn those edits back to my editor much more quickly than might have been normally the case, and now I’m putting in the final round of line edits/copyedits.

Wonderful, right? Well, this past week, I dusted off the various components of front matter and back matter Word documents from my first novel so they would be ready to go with the manuscript to my formatter this week. Publication pages for both print and e-book, a dedication page, a quotation page, reviews/praise for the first book, the call to action (plea for reviews/ratings), the author’s historical note, the acknowledgments section . . . and then, I realized what I did not have at all: a teaser chapter for the next book in the series. Oops.

I spent a few days convinced that I could dash off at least a first scene, if not a full-fledged chapter. I know the third book will take place in India! But, no, wait, it might end up being in Burma. Okay, but if the heroine arrives in early 1943, she won’t go straight to Burma, which was then under Japanese control, so I can still show her arrival in India. Sure, that seems reasonable. So, will I open with her stepping off the ship into the steamy streets of Bombay? Wait, did the troopships dock in Bombay at all or only Karachi or Calcutta? I don’t know. The back-and-forth with myself, as I say, went on for a couple of days last week.  

Panic eventually gave way to reason. I’m not going to have a teaser chapter by next week (or even by next month when the book officially releases), and I just have to make my peace with that. Rather than hastily throwing something together that might ultimately have to be scrapped entirely, I think it makes more sense to just eliminate that stress from my writing life in these trying times.

I may write a short note to my readers explaining that I spend several months reading widely and deeply about the theater of the war in which my novel will be set before I begin any writing at all. I have read all the available Red Cross Girl memoirs from the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater, but I now will turn to exploring online oral histories that will shed more light on the experiences of the ARC staff in these remote and challenging locations. And I’ve truly only begun the reading that will bear on the hero’s story.  So . . . no teaser chapter.

As many of us are noting on this blog, this is a good time to simply be kind to yourself and to others around you. We’re all dealing with much more than the ordinary stress, so there’s no point making things worse on that score. I hope all of you are taking time to get some fresh air each day, relax as you can, and spend time with your family and friends, whether physically in your household or virtually. Take care everyone!

Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Remember, you can check these sites later next week to see the cover and read the sales blurb for my second novel in the series.

You can purchase my debut novel through the links below.

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon CA  ~  Amazon AU  ~  Google ~ Nook  ~ Kobo