Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash
It’s a goal that I have chased after my entire life. Well, I say, “chased after,” and what I really mean is “dreamed about.” I’m nearing a life milestone (almost fifty years old), and for most of my life, I’ve just been too damned busy to really put in any effort into starting and then completing a novel.
When I was laid off from my corporate job after working there for decades, yet another victim of the great tech slough off of 2023, that should have been the perfect time to write a book. Eight months of severance time, to be precise. But I felt that writing a novel was too frivolous, and I was too nervous to be without “real” work for that amount of time.
I jumped immediately into the world of freelance, something that I had been doing on the side all along. While it kept me just as busy as I had been in my corporate job, it didn’t drain my soul like that old job did. After even the longest days of freelance work, I was still energized and inspired to work on a novel.
So, I did. I started out with the seed of an idea (a copy-editing detective set to solve a murder mystery in her small town). I started writing, and immediately hit block after block. That poor little seedling was failing to thrive no matter how many times I sat down to write. It wasn’t until I allowed myself to write without reins that my story really began to take off.
It was in that moment that I learned that I truly was a panster and not a plotter. I sat down every day and let my characters figure out on their own what they were going to do and where they were going to go. They explored the charming characters of the small town they lived in and immersed themselves in local history, stumbling into magic plots (and even a demon or two) along the way.
Every day, I wrote just a little bit. After several months, I was finally able to get to the part where I could type “The End.” There were no fireworks or celebration cakes. Just a quiet satisfaction at that final blinking cursor.
Of course, now the real work begins. My manuscript is littered with bracketed placeholders like [come up with goddess prayer here] and [fill out character X’s backstory here]. So, in this revision draft, I will need to fill in all of those holes.
I have also decided that while the first-person POV worked for a detective novel, it didn’t quite work for what this book eventually morphed into. I must now go through and rework the POV from beginning to end.
But I don’t mind this seemingly gargantuan task at all. I’m an editor after all, and I absolutely love the revision process. This is where I can drag a comb through the tangled mess of my story and conduct fun research along the way.
While there is still so much work to be done, I can finally, finally check this huge life goal off of my list!