Secrets of The Hollywood Girls Club with Guest Author Maggie Marr

I met Maggie Marr last year when her fun and fabulous first novel, Hollywood Girls Club debuted. Now Maggie’s back with a fantastic sequel, Secrets of The Hollywood Girls Club. For those of you who don’t know Maggie’s back story, she does hapen to know all of the Hollywood Girls Club secrets — she’s a former Hollywood agent. Welcome Maggie, we’re thrilled to have you! For more on Maggie’s marvelous books, visit www.maggiemarr.com

–Deb Lisa

Vacations

This topic is one I desperately wish, I had more experience with. My last vacation and probably best vacation ever, was a working vacation to BEA (Book Expo America) in NYC last June. Yes last June. The highlight (well the memory I luxuriated in months after) was sleeping in bed alone with my husband uninterrupted for an entire night. Alone? With your own husband? Your mind immediately goes to uhm…threesomes? I guess you could say yes, but most definitely not in the way you might think… Uhm no. More like parents. Parents of two of the loveliest little girls in the world. But alas, as any parent will tell you, being a parent often means getting out of bed, giving up your bed, or not going to bed.

So on this vacation, to NYC, where I actually stayed in a fancy schmancy hotel room what did I look forward to? Solitude. Lucky for me, this three day sojourn occurred immediately after the most horrible of realizations…that my second book, the manuscript that I’d just turned into my editor, the one that was to publish a mere 10 months from last june (a nanosecond in publishing time) Secrets of The Hollywood Girls Club…well…sucked. Yes sucked. As in to be very very bad.

Of course my editor, the fabulous Lindsey, was much too kind (and probably fearing that she wouldn’t have anyone to fix this monster if she told me) and very diplomatic in her first editorial letter to me. And if it weren’t for my mother-in-laws best friend making a fairly innocuous comment in the kitchen of my husband’s family’s kitchen I might not have realized, until it was too late, just how bad my manuscript was. But I did. In a flash of insight. I suddenly realized that not only was book two too long, the story contained too many characters and too many subplots…. What was an author to do?

Rewrite.

Yes, rewrite.

And rewrite, again.

And again.

Once more, rewrite.

Of course, during my three days in NYC, I was only on the first of the post ‘this really sucks’ realization rewrite. The initial shock of ‘Oh My God what the *&^# am I going to do’ sat lodged in the forefront of my brain. So I cut and I wrote and I ordered room service. I cut and wrote and went out to dinner. I cut and wrote and went for drinks. I cut and wrote and went to BEA (twice). And I cut and wrote and then flew back to the in-laws, because they of course were watching the two loveliest of little girls.

Now why, you might ask, why, Maggie, did you in the beginning of this blog say that this, this horrific vacation, spent locked in a hotel room, in one of the worlds most cosmopolitan of cities, writing and rewriting and eating and sleeping, why was this one of the best vacations you’ve ever had?

Because even though I was on vacation I did the work. I rewrote the book. I turned something that really worried me, into something I am amazingly happy with. Secrets of The Hollywood Girls Club doesn’t suck…in fact it’s good. Really good. (At least that’s what the reviewers are saying.) And I don’t feel bad saying it, I don’t feel like I’m being big-headed or braggy or show-offy or any of the other things us nice Midwestern girls aren’t supposed to be… No I feel happy. I feel blessed. And I feel joyful that I got to take the best vacation ever and rewrite my book because now, I am amazingly proud that I can share Secrets of The Hollywood Girls Club with you and the rest of the world.

Maggie