There’s going to be a few posts about this highlighting my experiences writing this new manuscript, and it was hard to decide which one I should focus on for my first entry. As I clicked the ‘title’ box, my fingers answered the question for me. DUODECIM is currently out on submission. I’m fortunate enough to have multiple agents reading my full manuscript, and if any of you are reading this, I’m waiting patiently, (and eagerly), and have trained myself to only refresh my email a few times a day. DUODECIM wasn’t an easy project, but not because I didn’t love the story. It was my first real work. I didn’t have a community of writers encouraging me and teaching me. I was in the throes of navigating a whole new world and I was discovering the tools to do it myself. It wasn’t until the last year of drafting that I joined the twitter writing community and made friends who opened up a world of opportunity to me. The revising of DUODECIM was harder than drafting, but the process went quicker. I went through so many drafts and I didn’t have a strategy. I changed a plot point in the beginning, started to implement it throughout, and then I would come to the end and realize there was an even better way of doing it. It took a big wake-up call from my friend Kat—who all of you should follow because she’s going to be huge one day, just you wait—who broke down all of the problems in my draft with the kind of honesty that hurts the same way antiseptic burns in a fresh cut. I learned what many of my bad writing habits were. I learned how to fix them. She poured my inbox with articles about craft, and was always there to hear me out when I needed to talk through a tricky plot problem. It took seven years to get DUODECIM to where it is, but I learned so much. This blog post isn’t about DUODECIM. Words cannot express how grateful I am for every one of those seven years, and every struggle I pushed through. In reflection, they changed who I am as a writer. That book is my love and my child, and without it, I couldn’t have learned my craft well enough to have written THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN. I went in with new tools, and a new understanding of drafting. I caught myself making the mistakes it took me ages to undo before I made them. I went in with an outline that kept me on track while still allowing me to let my characters tell their story. I changed up my tense and point of view to challenge myself, and found a new side to my writing style I didn’t know existed. THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN was an exercise in confidence and affirmation. Every time I put words on the page and they came easier than I ever imagined, I felt driven to push more out. With each finished chapter, seeing the story grow, I was inspired to dive into the next one. It was a vicious cycle, sans actually being vicious. I think writers don’t always take the time to celebrate these little landmarks. After all, writing is an art, and art is never really finished. It’s in our nature to criticize ourselves, and point out places where we could have done more. This post is an active step against that bad habit. I wrote my first draft of THE PUNCTUATION BETWEEN in three months. Yes, I still have revising to do, and it won’t be ready for querying tomorrow, but it still feels like a landmark to me. I pushed myself to do something that I never thought I would be able to, and finishing this draft feels like a victory. Of course, this story was landmark for me in a few ways, and there will be other posts for that in the coming days, but for now I simply want to say that I’m overwhelmingly proud of myself. Reader, for wherever you are in your writing lives, or even your every day lives, take a moment to be proud of yourself. Whether it be for putting words on a page, going to work, making an important call. Be proud of yourself, because it makes a world of difference. Now onto the next adventure: revising.
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