Amanda Hocking

I went ten whole days without Tweeting or blogging or Facebooking. TEN DAYS. (Although I did retweet things Mark Hoppus and Neil Patrick Harris said last week, because I wanted to).

Side note: Did you see the most awesome thing in the universe?

(In case you’re wondering the significance of said tweet, it’s that my heroes are John Hughes, Jim Henson, Mark Hoppus, and Batman. Out of those four, Mark Hoppus is the only that’s still alive and not fictional. So… that’s awesome.)

Anyway, back to the story. You may ask, why did you go ten days without using those things? Were you trapped in a cold dark cave without any internet?

So I’ll recap for you what my life was like for the past ten days:

Last Tuesday, I left to go on a houseboat with Eric and my dog Elroy. The plan was to get away, relax, enjoy nature, and finish my book. I’m going to make a long story short but what ended up actually happening was that we got on the boat, parked to take a nap, and woke up to find ourselves stranded with a dead engine, no radio, no cell phone service. We were completely stranded, and our only means of escape would be swimming several miles to Canada.

After several days of this, we were rescued by some nice people who saw us waving from our boat. After that, we decided to cut our trip short and return home.

On the boat, while suffering fear of my imminent demise (and frequently muttering, “This sorta thing would never happen to J.K. Rowling”), I got no writing done. And I still had much to do.

So when we got home, I decided to keep the internet ban that had been imposed on me on the boat so I could work without distractions. I would pretend I was still on the boat, but I could call 911 if I fell down and cracked open my skull. Well, I probably couldn’t call 911 if I cracked open my skull, but Eric could. And that’s what counts.

At any rate, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been finishing Wake, the first book in the series that St. Martin’s purchased. I’ve gone through it twice, for edits and revisions, and Eric’s gone through it once. He just finished reading it twenty minutes ago, so I’ll be going over that with him and seeing where he thinks I can improve stuff.

Then next week, I’ll send out to the book to my lovely editor Rose and find out what she thinks of it. (Fingers crossed she doesn’t hate it).

I’ll be honest – this book took me an awfully long time to write. I’d been about half-way through with it for months. I started it back in February and was working on it really well into my life started blowing up publicly. Then I really slowed down and didn’t work on it much until recently.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the story. I’m really excited about the premise and the characters, and I think it has a lot of potential to be a really awesome series. It was just that whole “butt in the chair” thing.

Every time I’d get my butt in the chair to write, I’d start surfing around on the internet, and I would start thinking about how I needed to write a really good book. The good people at St. Martin’s Press have been ridiculously supportive of me, but there is a sense of pressure on me that I didn’t have before. Not from them and not even really from my readers. Just from me.

I feel like I really had to prove myself with this book, and it’s hard to focus on the story and get any perspective when you’re thinking, “This has to be the best book I’ve ever written.”

When I finally got out of my head and forced myself to sit there and write, then it all just came together. I write because I enjoy writing, and sometimes that’s easy to forget when writing becomes your job. But once I started, I was on a roll of awesomeness.

For those of you who want to know more about Wake, I don’t want to really say a lot at this time. Also, since I have St. Martin’s with me on this, I don’t have write blurbs for it anymore (true story – writing blurbs is harder than writing books). So when they come up with a blurb, I’ll share that.

All I can really say is that it’s a young adult paranormal romance and things happen in it.

I did make this fancy soundtrack to go with it, though. And you can listen to that. (My soundtracks consist of the 15 or so songs that I listen to while writing the book that fit the best with the book itself. I think.)

Anyway – I’m glad to be back. Believe me when I say I missed you more than you missed me.