Good morning to all of you!

Last week, I received my editorial letter from my new editor, Sarah. I am so excited to start working on my next draft with their fantastic and intuitive feedback. Sarah had many good things to say and praised the ingenuity and uniqueness of the story, the world I’ve created, and the characters at its heart. There are still improvements to be made, as I expected, and I am thrilled to have new, specific goals to keep readying this work for publication. 

With this fresh draft, I will be delving into a few more aspects of world-building that I had only glossed over in previous drafts, namely the more intricate details concerning Paz government and the criminal justice system. Sarah’s simple suggestion regarding those two needs sparked my imagination to weave in a compelling new aspect of paz society that I think will not only address the necessary specifics, but will impact Inquieto and Carmen in powerful ways throughout the story.

In addition, I will be really flexing my writing muscles to perfect my first-person prose. "First-person" is the term used when a book is told directly from a character’s perspective. Example: "I went to the store yesterday, and an employee asked me if I needed help." Alternatively, the term "third-person" is used to describe a book that is told from the author/narrator’s perspective. Example: "The woman went to the store yesterday, and an employee asked her if she needed help."

Some of you know that Curio Citizen is the first and only novel that I have ever written in first-person. I naturally gravitate toward third-person, but I really felt from the beginning that Curio Citizen needs to be told from Carmen’s perspective. Her personal experience on Paz is vital to this "fish-out-of-water" tale, and while that is achievable through third-person prose, I think this novel will be far more powerful if the readers (you!) can experience everything exactly as Carmen does.

First-person prose can be tricky and is, in ways, a different art form than third-person. The ideal outcome would be for my voice as an author to disappear completely from the narrative, and only Carmen’s unique voice would shine through. In this round of revisions, I will be digging further into Carmen’s head to develop the natural course of her inner monologues and to describe the world as she sees it at a deeper level than what I have written in my previous draft.

After ten months of writing other books to practice my craft, I am certain I am up for the challenge for these new improvements. I am beyond ecstatic to dive back into Curio Citizen and return my focus to the heart and soul of the book--Carmen and Inquieto.

Thank you again for you interest and support! I will keep the updates coming!

Best,

Katherine

Last month, I took a trip to Europe with my brother Mike to o some research for scenes that take place in Europe in 1945 during WWII. We visited Antwerp, Koln and most importantly Nordhausen, site of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and the underground factory known as Mittelwerk where 20,000 slave laborers dug out tunnels in an old gypsum mine and manufactured the V-2 rockets used to bomb London and Antwerp.   

While I had done research for these scenes, there is an additional level of verisimilitude that gained from walking the same steps that scientists like Wernher von Braun did when he visited the camp, or where the 104th Infantry rode tanks into town to liberate the prisoners. 

I’ve received helpful and detailed feedback from the publisher on the most recent draft. The bad news is, there’s still a lot of work to be done. The good news is, it’s mostly about stripping out a lot of complexity that has grown into the story so that it can be more focused on the historical fiction elements. In the coming weeks, I’ll be re-assembling a new outline before diving back into the next draft of the novel that will be even better than the last.

On a sad note, my co-author Roxie passed away a couple of days ago. We knew she had cancer for the last couple of months and I’m grateful that she had so much energy and enthusiasm right up until the end. The house is eerily silent without her. 
—Zack