Bucket List: Write a Book

My initial motivation behind starting this novel was that I had read enough books to be able to try and tackle it.

It started as a challenge.

I think this a good starting point for me as I am a highly competitive, ambitious person. Life is too short, I want to try everything I can, even if it doesn't work out. Because (yes, despite what your High School English teacher told you, you can start a sentence with because) it was framed as a challenge, it made it easier to force myself to sit and block out time to work on it.

To be honest, I definitely didn't enjoy it at first, I had to force myself, but then slowly, I got hooked. Something came over me and I think my inner calling to write was finally fed and it came pouring out of me.

I had absolutely no plan for this novel, and I mean NO plan.

I had some rough sketches of characters and setting, but I was planning to "wing it." I would not recommend this to anyone and I will not be "winging it" ever again. The lack of planning led me to many different re-writes that nearly killed me.

Where one tiny detail needed to be added, I had to adjust the entire plot line to make it work. When you sprinkle in details, they have to be perfectly balanced throughout the entire novel, they can't just exist once or readers will forget. This meant LOTS of work and edits. BUT, I learned a lot through this process.

By the time I finished the novel 5 years later, I was sick of it. Utterly sick of it. I hated my story. I had re-read it so many times it was now terrible.

Trusting my gut that it was simply because I was so close to it, I moved forward with getting it professionally edited. I worked with my Editor, Cindi Jackson, and we went through months and months (I think combining to make a year in the end), of back and forth content and grammatical edits.

It was in this time she mentioned that publishers would not look at thrillers/mysteries with a word count over 100,000. My book was 139,000. That is a LOT of extra words. All of which I thought were important and essential to the story line. This was a punch to the gut knowing I had to go back and work the story again to cut it down.

By this point, this book was a chore. A burden. I lost sight of why I was doing it at all and just focused on getting it done. I didn't care what happened to it after, as long as it was done. I couldn't not finish a project.

The next step of getting a publisher was just as bad. I spent over a year pitching it to different publishers, some legit, some not and in that time had many different fellow writers tell me not to get my hopes up and the chances of getting my first manuscript published were minimal. They all had finished manuscripts on their desks, unpublished. I then heard of a small independent publisher called Black Rose Writing. I reached out to them and got my first hit. I was asked to clean it up a few more times (yes, even more edits), and finally it was ready.

Signing that publishing contract was the achievement I had been working toward (unbeknownst to me) for years and I felt immense relief. Not gratitude, but relief.

The challenge was finally over. I had accomplished something I said I would, likely surprising many people who thought I was just spouting ideas when I said I was going to write a book.

The problem with my personality is that it's never enough.

No achievement is ever enough and the end goal is always moving. I told myself that once I had that paperback in my hands I would sit with it and take in everything I accomplished to get there. Not before that.

Now, I have yet to receive that paperback in the mail (I think it's 2 weeks away in the mail), but I am deeply looking forward to that moment when I can finally take in everything I went through to get here (but i'll have to let you know if I just end up setting a new goal instead).

This is my passion. Writing is my passion, and so any products that come out of that are passion projects. I will not put pressure on myself to write, to publish, to monetize. If I do, I will lose the magic of the process, of the creativity that pours out of me when I'm in the zone.

When you force the writing it's not as good, it's emotionless, detached and you can feel it when you read it, and I fear once I tell myself and others I'm a writer, there will be automatic expectations.

I will continue to try to keep this mindset as I follow this tangent in my life. I will work every day to remember why I am doing this (simply because I like it). I have a career that enables me to pay my bills, I can't rely on my passion project to fill my fridge, or it'll be ruined, and I cannot worry about what people may think of my work.

This book is a work of fiction, a story I created and I can't lose sight of that. People don't judge Stephen King based on his morbid horror stories (or maybe they do, who knows). We are simply storytellers and my readers can take it or leave it, that is the beauty of art. It is different for us all.

Buy My Book (!)

All I can do is thank each and every one of you for believing in me and supporting me enough to at least give it a chance. Even if you stop 20% of the way in, that's fine. Even if you think it's too dark for you, thank you for opening it at all. Thank you for supporting my art, it feeds into the importance of supporting and acknowledging creative pursuits in our increasingly structured and pragmatic society.

"Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another."

-Joel Uili