Mischa Fox

Hello, all!

I’ve been offline for…. I believe about 6 weeks? I apologize for that. It’s been an incredibly busy time for me. First, my day job in tech had a project that spiked, so I worked a lot of extra hours. Second, I had my head down with minimal distractions to work on the revision suggestions from my agent Kristen Terrette.

Our goal was to get the publicity and marketing packet finished and tweak the manuscript to eliminate any weaknesses so that it would be ready for the next stage, which is submitting both to potential editors at various publishing houses.

I felt like I put in overtime at two highly intellectual jobs.

I had planned on returning to blogging over the weekend, but I honestly needed the three days to recover from both the end of my day job project (last Friday) and the massive undertaking of prepping the materials for publication (last Thursday). I only started to feel like myself again today.

As of this morning, SING THE BONES reached the inboxes of the editors!

None of this really felt REAL until this weekend. I started crying at lunch on Friday when I saw the new cover page with my literary agency’s contact information on it. I started crying again today when Kristen emailed me to let me know that the emails were sent, the Great Waiting Game began, and how excited we both were.

I chatted briefly with the friend who’s been in my life the longest via text at lunch. She said, “It’s a big day! You’ve worked towards this a long time” when I confessed how emotional I was.

At first I thought she meant this particular manuscript. SING THE BONES reached novel-length in rough draft form in March of 2022. It’s been two long years of perfecting that story. Multiple drafts. Changes, adds, deletions, revisions, rewording, restructuring. I shudder to calculate the hours I bled into this thing.

And that wasn’t the beginning.

I wrote the first five or six chapters of SING THE BONES in 2014 before briefly shelving it due to extenuating circumstances. I knew as soon as I wrote the first few paragraphs, it was going to be this one. This one that would eventually be my debut novel. But I wasn’t ready to write it yet. Life took me along the scenic route (as it tends to), and I wasn’t able to return to it until 2022, with far more experience, wisdom, and fearlessness to tell the story the way it wanted to be told.

But that, too… wasn’t The Beginning.

I wrote my first real short story when I was 7. (I was really mad about the ending of the original 1970s film version of WATERSHIP DOWN–which is still one of my favorite films and books of all time–so I wrote my own happy ending. Long before we even called this ‘fanfic.’)

When I was 10, I had a homework assignment to write a two-page puppet story. Minimum. I think mine was 15 pages–and I do remember it took the entire class to hold a paper origami or paper cutout puppet to act it out. It seeded the first major writing project I worked on. By worked on, I mean, I obsessively wrote daily, hourly, whenever I wasn’t in school, episodes of this story. I told versions of them as bedtime stories babysitting. I bought books on worldbuilding and writing in high school.

This world and its inhabitants grew up with me. (I know it’s not quite their time yet, but soon…)

It was that one I first tried getting published (in all the wrong ways, because I didn’t know better and this was when the internet was not in every home yet) when I was 23.

That one taught me how to write. How to build worlds, cultures, and characters. How to fail. How to get back up again. How to know when to set something aside and work on something else. That made me start to really dream about writing books.

It took a bit longer for me to learn the other pieces I needed to get here.

But… since I was 10. She was right. I’ve been waiting a LONG time for this moment. It’s perfectly understandable that I’m emotional and crying.

That while I’m forcing myself to take a break to balance myself back out and recover from the physical, mental, and emotional ramifications of the last six whirlwind weeks… I have moments of “writing hangover”.

When I was an actor, dancer, and musician in a previous incarnation, we called the day after the last show “performance hangover.” You’ve worked so hard, for so many months, to perfect something… and then suddenly…. it’s over. It’s gone. You have this unexpected grief. This dazed few days where you wonder what on earth you’re going to do with your life now. Especially since suddenly all those hours you spent rehearsing and perfecting are suddenly free. You don’t know what to do with all that time.

Silly, that I wasn’t anticipating to feel this for the book. I associated it so strongly with a live crowd, I didn’t realize any true heart project has this stage.

My energy levels recovered over the weekend, but I’d like to create a better schedule to prevent myself from burning out like this again.

I’m also planning on writing a few scenes for another project that’s wiggled at the back of my head the last few months, hungry for attention. It will help me with the work/life rebalancing process as well as jog my creativity overall.

Then I’ll return to the rough draft for the sequel to SING THE BONES to minimize the gap between novels.

This week I’ll also be returning to making regular Tiktok and Instagram video posts, so follow me there!

I can’t believe I’m finally HERE. I can’t believe this is REAL.