Beginning

I started this blog with a two-fold purpose--to get back into the habit of daily writing and to document the balancing act of my life as mother, writer, and full-time teacher.  When I began, I had finished one novel, The Star Crossing, which tells the story of a woman learning to paint in order to find  her bearings in life after a personal tragedy.  I had spent some time querying agents without success and was in this strange place as a new writer...I had researched but was still (blissfully) ignorant of how long this process can be.

So I was sort of lost and uncertain about writing--lost because I wasn't writing regularly, and I felt as though I was neglecting some essential part of me.  Uncertain because...well, did this endless stream of rejection mean that I had no talent, that I actually had no business writing at all?

Of course, I know now, thanks to industry blogs and writer blogs and Absolute Write and twitter and my writing group, that my experience is typical, but most people are pretty unaware of how long it can take to go from writing your first novel manuscript to actually selling a book...and I'm not there yet!

At the same time, I was watching my children grow more rapidly every day and was realizing more and more that even though I spent eight hours a day with children, that didn't actually mean I knew anything at all about raising two rambunctious sons.

So I started posting here, and pretty soon I found myself walking around with words in my head again, little stories I wanted to tell about my kids or about my journey.  I wrote daily, or nearly so, and as I did, I started to get confidence back about writing.  Before I knew it, I was writing novel number two--a YA boy book about an impulsive teen who makes a dubious decision to take his history teacher's car instead of taking the final exam.

By this time, I knew enough to keep writing, and I started my third novel while still querying the second, always getting just enough encouragement or forward progress to keep going.  That third novel, tentatively titled The Dharma Bum Business, took me through multiple revisions and eventually attracted agent interest, leading me to where I am today...represented by the lovely Sarah Davies of Greenhouse Literary and nervously awaiting news and edits before sending it out to editors with fingers crossed and a lot of patience.

So this is the point where it gets harder to figure out this online presence, what this blog should be or become.  If/when my book sells, my audience will be teenagers and others who read YA.  The odds are good that they will not really care to read about my adventures in parenting.  One of my purposes in beginning this blog--to get myself back to writing regularly--has been achieved.  Since beginning novel number two, I haven't gone more than a week without writing something new.  I'm now working on the first draft of my fifth novel.  I have an amazing online network of talented writers, and I feel so lucky and enriched by their presence in my life.  So I can see some sort of transition in the near future:  maybe a new online home apart from this place, maybe an actual author site?  Maybe it will occupy me so much that I won't be able to keep up with posts here, or maybe I'll do both, keeping this place for kid stuff and family stuff.  But for now, this is going to remain a mish-mash of me, with posts sometimes leaning toward mom-life and sometimes toward writer-life.  Occasionally, I might mix it up and talk about politics or something, but...that's not real likely.  And now I'm going to get to work.

1 comment:

Katie McLauchlin said...

Gosh don't even BOTHER to tell me how handeling kids is! Actually were alike in more thn just one way. I'm also an aspiring YA writer and have one little boy of my own. I'm almost finished with revising my first novel (and silly me I still haven't named it... well I have but it keeps changing!) I hope we could maybe keep in touch? I feel quit stupid for saying this but I haven't even gotten a blog or site up. Anyways email me! My email address is KatieMclauchlin_Writer@yahoo.com. ~Ciao