My Costume? I'm an Author

The truth is Santa once carted a typewriter all the way from the North Pole and lovingly placed it under our Christmas tree.  Hopefully he left a few dollars in my mom’s stocking, because she was the one replacing my typewriter ribbons as I filled pages upon pages with stories, stories I was convinced would catapult me onto a best-selling list before I left junior high school.

I became interested in boys and wrote about hand holding and note-passing and breathless first kisses.  I became more interested in boys and experienced those things.   I decided my first novel wouldn’t be finished until after high school, filling floppy disks with ideas and beginnings and endings, the middle of my epics hazy and unsure. 

My dreams of moving to New York and writing for a living out of a studio apartment curled inward, pushed back by ideas of journalism and white space and bylines.  They shrank into the corner during the angst-inducing year of philosophy classes, later beaten into submission by the academic reading and writing required of an English major. 

The truth is dreams can get tired, too.  Teen author slid into young adult author until finally my fingers stalled at my keyboard, and I casually relegated the idea to “one day I will write books.”  One day in the future, one day when the kids are grown, one day when my life feels settled, I will write books.

Everything changed when I met Greta.  If you’re shaking your head and looking around for a straightjacket as I talk about meeting a fictional protagonist, you’re probably a reader and not a writer.

The truth is I didn’t create her or imagine her or plan her; she walked into a specific writing prompt and presented herself, and I needed to know more about her. 

So I wrote her, in snippets and glimpses, without regard for chronology, filling in the details as they revealed themselves to me.

More than a few thousand words, and several snapshots of her life, later, and I’m at the point where I think it’s time we made a commitment.

And that’s where novel-writing dreams collide with a compelling character and begin to dance to the frantic tunes of NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month.  Or November, to the non-crazy people who don’t plan on churning out 50,000 words in the next thirty days.

The truth is I’m unsure about this undertaking.  Nervous.  Exhilarated.  Terrified.

The truth is I wouldn’t have done it without the excitement percolating around it at Write on Edge.

The truth is I can’t do it without their support.

The truth is I can’t do it without YOUR support.

The truth is I’ve always known there are novels curled together in my brain, patient and dormant, biding their time.

The question is can this one make the leap into reality?

photo courtesy of Laura at Purple Sky Photography

hopefully I'll still be smiling by November 30th

and as for the nitty-gritty ,I'll still be posting during this experiment

I'm aiming for three posts a week-Monday, Wednesday, & Friday

This week's prompt was The Truth.

Every MONDAY join us…
Write, post, link-up, share your story and your voice. Be part of carrying the weight of confidence and share our mission
to empower, inspire, and remind women, parents and children
that the time has come to celebrate ourselves!

Next week’s prompt: “Something you do not regret doing”

(Remember you can also write on a topic of your choice.)