julian_griffith

I submitted to Samhain two weeks ago. That makes it 10-14 weeks until I hear from them.

I got concrit back from

erastes after I'd already sent it in. She had plenty to say about it -- some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't, but I was grateful to hear her points. Mostly my reaction was "hm, if it gets rejected, I'll see what I can do about some of this."

I also looked over various other publishers' submission guidelines and genre classifications. And it reinforced my feeling that I had done a slightly weird thing, having a menage romance without an actual threesome sex scene.

My reason for not having it before was that it'd mess with the pacing: the sex scene between the heroine and hero #2 is about three scenes before the end, and I couldn't see how I could add another without unbalancing the book or needing to pick another endpoint.

But when I was talking about it with

mswyrr, I figured out that I could make the threesome scene a sort of extension of the final one... because after the heroine and the lieutenant have their love scene, they both wind up in the viscount's bed for cuddling and sleeping (for as long as they can sleep, given the demands of a nursing infant). All I had to do was let the lieutenant wake up after only a short doze, and things could progress from there. So I did. And I'm awfully damn happy with how it turned out.

While I was doing that, I took some of the concrit into account and rewrote some scenes. I made it clearer at two early points that Lt. Thorne had some attraction to women, but his circumstances gave him little chance to act on it in a way he found acceptable, and I sharpened the regret that Thorne and Rockingham felt at breaking it off with each other. They're both pretty outwardly reserved, and that's how I wrote it, but I found a way to get their internal regrets (pure misery, in Thorne's case, but he'll be damned if he lets anyone see it) across without breaking that. In the process, I also used one of those bits to clarify just why Thorne meant more to Rockingham than many of his other lovers had.

And the threesome sex scene, which starts out as just Thorne and Rockingham (until Caroline wakes up), begins with what, for them, is some highly emotional dialogue. I don't think it's over-the-top, but it's about as intense as either of them is willing to get.

So now, the next thing I'll do is to mess around with the formatting and actually get it in to Carina, and then once those countdowns are done, if they don't buy it, see about the smaller publishers that also handle menage and have shorter turnaround times.

But, man am I happy with that threesome sex scene.

Final wordcount: 79,873