THE QUILL & THE INKPOT

This is the tenth post in my ABCs of Writing series: Post J

I thought about posting this without saying anything about the fact that the last blog I wrote was nearly two years ago. I don’t have a reason for that gap, other than that I’ve had a lot of other things going on, and, more, that I just didn’t feel like I had anything interesting to post about.

Well, events have been moving pretty quickly during the past few months, and I now have some interesting news: that story I’ve been going on about, I’m publishing it on November 14!

But first, let’s go back in time a bit…

11 years

I remember the day this story came into my head. It was back in 2012, just a few months after I graduated from college. I was sitting in my fiancé’s—now husband’s—apartment.

“I need to start a story, now that actually have time to write,” I said. Or something along those lines. We’ve already established that my memory isn’t too great.

“So do it,” he said.

I wonder if he’s come to rue those words, now that I’ve spent over a decade creating and agonizing over this story. Along the way, I also wrote books 2 and 3, but those are tales for another day. This is the story of book 1, which brings us to…

15 revisions

Fifteen full revisions of reading, shredding, and bringing back together the massive 200,000-word story I had created (eventually forcing it down to 130,000 words).

Why did it take so many revisions? I started without an end in mind. I started with a setting, figured out which characters inhabited it, and discovered the problem they were facing. And then slowly meandered around until I figured out how they were going to solve this problem.

I wrangled the story into shape, and finally deemed it ready for other people to see…

54 rejections

It was a hard step, deciding I was ready for people to see my work. I’m proud that I made that step, though, and jumped into sending query letters, seeing if anyone, publishers or literary agents, were interested in publishing this story.

This query journey took lasted for several years, and I don’t know that I enjoyed any of it. It was frustrating, heartbreaking, and came close to ending my dream for these books. I don’t need to rehash those years. I already did that once.

The most important thing is that these years brought me to a decision…

1 decision

I took those rejections, those unanswered queries pretty hard. I questioned myself, my abilities, my creativity. I almost let it break me. All in the name of wanting to be that traditionally published author. All because I had heard so many people speak so derisively of self-publishing.

Then, I realized one day, Why do I care? I thought about why I wrote this story in the first place: I did because I’m a reader. There are so many books that have meant so much to me throughout my childhood and into my adulthood, books that have helped me escape and helped be grow. Some of the words in those books still run around in my mind.

That’s why I started writing. I thought that some of my words could mean something someday to some faceless reader somewhere.

So why should the traditional, and problematic, modern-day publishing industry get in the way of that quiet goal? It wasn’t a hard leap to make that final decision…

1 day

So now it comes down to this, one day: November 14.

If you’ve read any other posts in my blog, you’ll know that a whole host of emotions are building in me as this day approaches. I’ll talk about them more in the coming weeks.

But, for now, I just want to sit here at the sunset of a massive chunk of my life—and just enjoy it.

And maybe you can enjoy it too (you didn’t think I’d publish something without adding a link to the final product, did you?)

You can now find the story I spent all those years working on at Amazon. The ebook is available for pre-order, but if you wait until November 14, the paperback will be available as well. Heck, I’m even a Goodreads author now. Who woulda thunk it?

As always, keep an eye on my blog. There’s still two more books coming your way. You didn’t think I could finish the entire story that I spent 11 years writing in a single book, did you?