Cooling Off Period

[Daphnesmate]

Hi, I've been reading about how it is best to shove your work in a drawer for a while before editing it. I am fast approaching what I believe to be the final edit of my first novel but I haven't done this cooling off thing that I have just read about.

Has anyone done this and if so, did you find it made any difference, doing this? I can't envisage making any major structural changes to the book now (I have made a couple already) and I am trying to prepare it for beta reading. Time is of the essence really as I have 3 dc and two of the will be breaking up for the Summer Holidays mid July (I have been working on this book for at least 3 years, so not rushed) and I was hoping to get it more or less ready by then. I have edited my book what feels like hundreds of times already but each time I re-read it, I find something else that isn't quite right (the odd word/sentence) but I am happy with the content. Any advice greatly appreciated.

If all you are doing is obsessively 'tweaking' it, then you need to stop! If your plot works out and you are happy with your characters and you have a good synopsis, then probably it's worth submitting it to a couple of agents at this point. You'll only be sending your first couple of chapters and your synopsis. It will take at least several weeks for the agent to come back to you so there is your natural cooling-off period. If the agent wants to read the rest, and is interested in it, then the agent may suggest changes. If the agent likes it and is prepared to send it onto a publisher and the publisher likes it, then the publisher will get back to you with suggested changes. If neither of those things happens, and by the time you've tried a half-dozen agents and had no response, then then this may be the point at which you have to ask yourself, is there something I've missed and could change? If you ask nicely, very often agents will give you critical feedback regardless of whether they like the book.

This is also the point at which you send it off to your beta readers and ask them for feedback. The 'cooling-off' period just means that you love it too much and are too invested in it when you have been working on it for ages and you've lost the ability to be analytical and cool-headed.

By the time you've had feedback from your beta readers and - hopefully - a few agents, enough time will have passed anyway for you to be able to view your work more dispassionately - ie, the autumn.

Overall, sorry to say, generally the agent thing takes months and months. This is absolutely nothing to do with how good your book is, so don't be dispirited!

Hope this helps

Thanks Vivienne, this is really useful.

Tweaking things is most certainly my problem. Nothing worse than writing a good amount before you go to bed one night and thinking it was good and them opening it the next day and deleting half of it and changing things around...and then deciding you probably shouldn't have even changed it in the first place and now 12 pages has become 3...that you still aren't happy with.

Probably best to write as much as you can and get it to flow and once you've finished, go back and adjust. That being said, knowing me that would mean starting the whole thing over again after the 'adjustments' xD

Good luck with your book!