And the Winners Are ...

Maryn Sinclair has announced the winners of her books. Congratulations to

Linda and Karen. 

Email Maryn at MarynSinclair (at) gmail (dot) com and she'll get your prizes to you!


Thanks for commenting.  And be sure to come back next week, because my guests have another giveaway.

When Are You Finished Editing?

Today, my guest is Maryn Sinclair. Maryn is a New England native living in the South who loves creating characters who murder, love, hate, and connive, but mostly love. Her novels are erotic, but she hopes readers find that they’re more than about sex, with contemporary characters who are confident, insecure, damaged, recovering, loyal, duplicitous, intriguing, heartbreaking, and every other conflicting adjective known to Roget, hooking readers from the beginning and turning pages until the end.

Leave a comment for a chance to win one of Maryn's books. She'll be choosing two lucky readers. Please check the end of this post for details.

When do you say your book is finished and enough is enough? At the South Carolina Book Festival on May 14, bestselling author Robert Dugoni mentioned that if he had his way, he’d be red-penciling his manuscript as it rolled through the presses. Boy, could I relate. Not that my books are rolling off the presses, because they’re e-books and I’m certainly not in the same class as a bestselling author, but because if someone didn’t set a due date, I’d forever keep editing until I probably sucked the life out of what I liked about my book in the first place. So when do you decide your book is ready to go to print, or e-print?

The question made me think of my very first freelance job as the owner of my own illustration/copywriting business. I’d freelanced for Fairchild Publications, a national chain of fashion newspapers, including Women’s Wear Daily, doing all the illustrations that originated from manufacturers and designers in the New England area. Rarely, the New York paper would publish one of my drawings, but usually they were redrawn and bundled to coordinate with fashion reports from other regional offices around the country. One day, I received a call from an exclusive shop on Boston’s trendiest street, asking me to draw a shoe for their Sunday ad. I decided that this was going to be the best drawing of a shoe ever to hit any newspaper anywhere on the planet. I accepted the job, settled at my drawing board, and began.