I finished up the Assassin revisions last night. Huzzah! The new, shiny book has been e-mailed to my agent for her perusal. I’m sure she’ll have some more suggestions for me on how to tweak it, but for now, it’s done.

This is probably the hardest book I’ve ever written. I’ve been wanting to write a book about an assassin for about seven years now. Over the years, I’ve taken a couple different stabs at it. The book started out as an epic fantasy. But I’m not really good writing about swords and horses and castles. So I put that aside and started a new epic fantasy. Again, it sucked. And I finally realized I needed to write something set in a more modern, contemporary world. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea for Karma Girl and started writing that.

But in between writing the Bigtime books, I wanted to start a new series, so I sent a bunch of proposals to my agent. She picked the Assassin one and basically said, “Write this one. Now.”

So I wrote it and sent it to her. She wanted me to revise it. So I did. Other people read it. We got some more feedback on the book. And now, I’ve revised it again. We’re talking major revision here. This time, I gutted the last half of the book. Yep, I threw away about 50,000 words and rewrote the back half. Characters, scenes, story arcs, all of it changed. But the book is much, much better because of it.

And I did all this in three weeks. I’ve pretty much been working on the revisions nonstop, three, fours hours every night, half of the weekends. But now, it’s done, and I’m taking a few days off from writing — before I start plotting out Assassin 2.

But you know what? Rewriting the last half of the book was probably some of the easiest work I’ve ever done. Makes me think I’ve finally found my groove with this series. After seven years, it’s about time, ain’t it? 😎