Confession: there’s a version of Deliberately Lost that lived quietly in my drafts folder for years before it became a real book. The bones were always solid. Maxine, a travel blogger who cannot mind her own business (professionally, this is a feature, not a bug), decides to retrace the pre-wedding trip her grandmother Marion took across Europe decades ago. What she finds is not the tidy nostalgia trip she was expecting. Nothing in this house is ever tidy.
I just wrapped a full developmental and line edit on this one, and it grew a little in the process. 27 chapters became 31. Somewhere around 76,000 words now, and every new scene had to fight for its spot or get cut. Maxine solves this mystery herself, nobody hands her the answers, and the blog she keeps writing the entire time never stops being a liability. Every post is a decision. Some of them are bad ones. That’s the fun part.
Here’s the part I actually want to talk about. I usually do my read-through with the robot voice, the flat computer narrator that catches typos but has zero feelings about anything. This time my wife read the whole manuscript out loud to me instead. Cover to cover. In an actual human voice, with actual reactions, including one very pointed pause that told me exactly which line needed cutting before she’d said a word. I’ve never had a person read one of my own books back to me before. Jolene sat through most of it too, judging both of us equally.
I don’t think I’m going back to the robot.
I also went back into the love triangle and gave it a real overhaul. Veronica was never supposed to win Maxine over on romance alone. Her actual weapon was always the writing, and once I let that be the thing driving the tension, the whole triangle stopped feeling flat.
Deliberately Lost is in its final stretch before release. More soon, but for now, thank you for sticking with Maxine’s very messy trip across Europe. It took me a while to get this one right.
With love,
Harlo
