It's Done, It's Finished, All gone, bye-bye!

Well, not quite gone yet, but the book I've been working on in one form or another for almost a year now is ready to go off to Conciliar. Deadline is July 31, and for a while I didn't think I was going to make it, but I finished the last revision tonight.

Is it actually finished? Of course not - I can think of several things I would like to put in, some of which I just ran across tonight, and which I will have to add to make sure details are correct, but in the main, I could send the ms. off to Jane, my editor, tonight. There's lots I'd love to still do to the book, to add detail and depth and richness. But one of the problems with working with the YA book form is you are restricted in its length. Normally I don't find that a problem, one of the things I like about writing for YA is that it's a comfortable length for me to work in - my ideas seem to flesh out around 30-50,000 words. But this book is different for a variety of reasons.

First is that this is the first book bio that's ever been written about Princess Ileana of Romania. She's had lots of articles written about her, loads of gossip, she herself wrote two memoirs, and she was fairly extensively included in the two bios of her mother - The Last Romantic, by Hannah Pakula, and Marie of Romania by Terry Elsberry (now the Rev. Terry Elsberry). But no bio. So that's an incentive to include every damn detail about her I can find, thereby making the book about 18 times longer than it should be! For that reason alone, the book is important.

Then, she's an unusual woman - not many members of a royal family end up as monastics. The only other one I can think of was Ileana's cousin/aunt, Saint Elizabeth the New Martyr, who lived at the same time as Ileana, but was older. There may be others, but I bet they were medieval. So the book is important for that reason. Then, she was one of the monastic pioneers in North America.

It was Mother Alexandra (her monastic name) who taught a huge number of people - Romanian and non-Romanian - in this country that Orthodoxy even HAD a monastic tradition, and I'm sure she was the first one to open an English language monastery in North America. The translations that were made for Holy Transfiguration are the same ones the church now uses as the Lenten Triodion and the Festal Menaion. So the book is important because she's a very important part of the history of the Orthodox Church in North America.

So I want it to be longer, richer, deeper and better than it is. I'm not unhappy with it, overall, but I sometimes wonder if I really caught HER or am just giving isolated snapshots and you never really get to know the woman I'm trying to show you.

I'll see. For now, it's finished, and I'm pleased and happy. It feels good!