The short answer is, if you’ve read it you know how Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 ultimately turned out: amazing story, critically acclaimed, loved by dozens. 😉 The longer answer’s a little more complicated—and amusing, in a terrifying sort of way…

In the last two posts I explained how, after sitting down to discuss the first-draft manuscript with my friend and editor Howard Zimmerman—and agreeing with pretty much everything he had to say about what a poor-ass story I’d told—I was faced with the task of not just rewriting half the book, but cutting a sizable chunk of the almost 500-page doorstop he’d had to edit. A barrage of back-and-forth e-mails followed, in which I described to Howard my plans for the rebuilding; thankfully, he agreed with them. And how I stumbled into writing what became for me the linchpin scene of the book, simply by the luck of a song playing on the radio as I was going over my notes: James Taylor’s rendition of “Up On The Roof.”

Now it was time to get to work. I went back to the beginning and started revising Pan right from her introduction. Out came the overwhelming combativeness and snark and “airhead moments” (to use Howard’s term) that made her a fairly unlikable character; in came a smarter, more introspective girl with a macabre sense of humor. Mom and Dad no longer hated each other. Dave Zwieback stopped being a dick. Annie wasn’t going to put the moves on him. And the angry tone of the first draft melted away, replaced by a cast of characters who actually cared for one another and, I thought, were pretty damn funny and likable. Except for the vampires—they were still evil assholes.

And then, before I knew it, it was done. Completed. At last I had a draft I was happy with. This, I felt, was now a story worth telling. And a good thing, too: the book was originally scheduled for April 2011, but I’d already blown the production deadlines for that to happen. So June became the new release month. There was just one problem: Howard didn’t have time to edit it—at least not in time for me to get the book out in June.

See, Howard just isn’t an editor, he’s got his own business to run: Z File, Inc., a book packaging company that’s produced some huge fiction and nonfiction graphic novels for major publishing houses: the science titles The Stuff of Life and Evolution: The Story of Life; adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes; and the New York Times bestseller, Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works. When I’d dropped the first draft of Blood Feud on his table I’d been lucky enough to catch him during a lull in his schedule. But now? He had two projects in the middle of production and wouldn’t be able to tackle my second draft for about a month.

My reaction? “Oh. Yeah, no, I understand. That’s cool. Well, uh…then I hope you like it in book form.”

I hope you like it in book form.

That’s right: the second draft of Blood Feud became the final draft with some tweaking that continued all the way up to the final, printed book. Without my editor looking it over. I sent the Word file off to designer Mat Postawa for typesetting, and from there it ultimately went to the printer to become the book you know and love. 😀

Crazy, huh? Talk about taking a major risk! But I was so absolutely confident in what I’d accomplished, so positively certain that I’d addressed Howard’s concerns about the book and that this was the version of Pan’s story I’d always meant to tell, that I sent it to press.

And again, I lucked out. The book became a critical success; Pan has been referred to as a positive role model for girls; people have thanked me for creating a character with a weird-but-awesome name who’s so cool they’d love to be friends with her; one woman even remarked that Pan is so in tune with her own thoughts and feelings that the book must have been written by a female author.

The bottom line, though? None of that would have happened if I hadn’t listened to my editor the first time around. Blood Feud might have remained an angry book about angry people, and a project I’d either have killed or spent eternity regretting being published because the world turned out to hate the nasty, overwritten doorstop that was the first draft.

Thanks, Howard!