Some Observations on Publishing My First Novel Many Years Later by Marilyn Levinson

 I was thrilled when a new boutique publisher recently asked to publish the very first novel I'd ever written. Come Home to Death is a suspense novel. The opening scene came to me in a dream while my family was vacationing out at Montauk on Long Island, and I can still envision my heroine being chased by a thug who is about to tell her that her husband owes his boss a huge gambling debt he'd better pay up. Though I transformed the scene from a beach to a coffee shop in upstate New York, the terror and shock still remain.

When I wrote this book many years ago, I had no idea how to categorize it. I sent it out to editors. It received rejections, though one wrote back to tell me she liked it and would have taken it if that was the kind of book she bought. I revised Come Home to Death a few times over the years, and an editor friend even edited it. Eventually, I stopped sending it out and let it lie peacefully amid the many documents on my computer.

I thought the manuscript was in pretty good shape when Kelly Moran of Rowan Prose Press offered to publish it. The last four or five books that I've written have required little editing, and so I wasn't prepared for the many issues she and the editor raised, issues that needed to be addressed in order to make this a really good story for readers to enjoy. However, I agreed with every one of them.

It took time to go through the manuscript to make the many subtle changes required, such as making my protagonist less headstrong about walking into danger so that she doesn't come across as brainless. I also had to make a character change early on in the novel. But at this point I'm quite adept at adding and changing text. Most of what I originally wrote has remained. I only clarified some things and made others more plausible.

I was glad I had the opportunity to edit and revise Come Home to Death, and to finally put it into readers' hands on April 30th. It showed me how much I've learned about writing fiction over the years. It validated my belief that learning to write fiction is a process, and the more we write the better we become.