I started my first novel in May of 2020, about seven months after I wrote my first short story as an adult (there had been many, many, many when I was a child). Writing a novel was my goal, the secret goal of my heart, since I was a child, and the first novel began as a germ that I thought could grow. I took an online course with the wonderful novelist Jennifer Close to develop it, and then, about six months later, a more intensive novel-writing course with her. I spent the following six months re-writing, polishing, editing, and asking my trusted people to read it. In March of 2021, I sent the novel out to agents.
I can’t say when I started the second novel exactly, though I sent out a short story based on the critical moment of what would become the novel on April 15, 2020, and then sent the finished product out to agents beginning in June of 2022. In the meantime, I published a 100-word version here and hired an amazing editor to review the novel, whose assistance not only improved the novel beyond the first one, but gave me advice that I still use in my writing.
When I read back over portions of that first novel, mostly hoping to mine it for flash, I see a lot of imagination and a lot of fearlessness, or what is less nicely characterized as ignorance. I didn’t know the rules, didn’t know how hard it was going to be, didn’t understand Craft with a capital C. I thought I had a story to tell, and I wrote it down. Like when you find a picture of your grinning six-year-old self and before you question her fashion choices or grow nostalgic for your old house, you think, “She had no idea about the rules.”
I wish there was a pretty conclusion to this musing. Something along the lines of, “In April of 2023, I started my third novel. After a lot of work, I can proudly say that I am now agented and preparing to polish the manuscript to send to publishers!” Unfortunately, the truth is I have been struggling since April of 2023 with an idea that I can’t seem to wrestle to the ground, and there will not be a third novel until I push through the wreckage of those first two and get back to the ignorant/imaginative moment that got me writing Novel #1 in the first place.
With naive, foolish hope, I will end this post by saying, to be continued…