Elaine Forrestal – still smiling

With my new historical novel, Goldfields Girl, creeping closer to completion I’m reminded of the ‘kitchen dance’. Just as the preparation and serving of any meal forces the family members involved to perform an elaborate dance between the kitchen bench, the oven and the table, sidestepping, pirouetting, arms reaching out, sometimes even wrapping around each other, until their delicious and sustaining offering is ready to consume.

My editor and I perform more of a cyberspace dance. We work in the confined and increasingly cluttered space of our editing software. With the margins of our shared document filling up with comments, suggestions, questions and their often elusive answers, we dance respectfully around each other. Sometimes connecting, sometimes pulling back, circling, swaying, spinning around each other and stepping on toes, until we figure out how to dance together. Through it all we never doubt that we can do this. But we are always searching for that perfect balance that will produce a story everyone will want to read. And while the search is often challenging, deep down we know that eventually we will both find the same page, and dance to the same music.

Stay tuned.