Writing origins and memories associated with such

Writing that first novel, November 2006.

While I bailed on National Novel Writing Month this year, I am wholly grateful to it for sending me on my authorial way. But even more so, I am extremely thankful for the one who brought it to my attention, my eldest child who in the autumn of 2006 was seventeen and knew me far better than I realized. That young woman will celebrate her birthday soon, and here we are, sixteen years later, and yes, I'm still noveling.

Currently I'm in the last third of That Which Can Be Remembered, what's next on the publication docket, revisions that have turned up two typos, oops! I've excised about fifty-plus unnecessary words, just niggly stuff but imperative to releasing the best version of said novel. In doing so, I'm brought back to this time in 2006, my daughter having directed me to NANO in late September or early October of that year. I don't recall from where I came up with the plot for that first book, but I do remember plenty of prep-work, then diving into writing as though all my dreams were meant for that month. I collected over 100K, true facts! Finished the book the following spring, when we moved from Britain back to America, and by January of 2009, Drop the Gauntlet was published by a small press, dude....

Yet let me return to 2006.... I was using a behemoth of a laptop, squeezing in writing time amid homeschooling three teenagers, lol! I had turned forty earlier that year, how much that played into my decision to write a novel is probably more than a bit of incentive. I categorize my adult life as follows:

20s - I had kids (in America).

30s - I raised kids (in the United Kingdom).

40s - I wrote novels (in California).

Those are rough estimates, but certainly a fair assessment of how basically I spent those decades. And for what it's worth, my 50s is a mish-mash of grandmotherhood, writing, grieving my late parents, quilting, adjusting to my husband's retirement, moving to Humboldt County.... Too much going on to pin my life on one or even two topics. Sixteen years ago, as I was just taking the first steps into noveling, I had no idea what would occur. Yet my oldest had an inkling, she's also the one to introduce quilting to my life, so never say your kids don't know what you want to do, or what you could do, ha ha! While I had fantasized about writing, the time or inclination never emerged until it was plopped into my lap and from then to today, fiction takes up a lot of my time.

Which isn't a bad thing, although in print it's a dubious sentence. I used to joke that writing kept me out of trouble (and out of Target), and mostly it's true, on both counts. At times I get, um, a little obsessed with a story, but my family understands, especially my husband. Because now writing is as much a part of me as breathing, thereabouts. And as I've also joked, better to expend my emotional drama on characters than my own kin.

Where the writing goes from here, well, I hope a new novel appears sometime next year; either I'll rescue A Rose Blissful from the hard drive hinterlands or I'll start the necessary sequel to The Earthen Chronicles. Or begin something wholly different, always a possibility. But there will be something; since 2006 I have accepted writing as my pastime/hobby/occupation/sanity valve. And the thanks for it has to start first with Christ, then to my daughter. Thirty-some years ago I was about to begin the wonderful road to motherhood. Seventeen years later that young woman introduced another path, and how blessed am I that writing usually runs parallel to the main roads of my journey. My daughter's eldest has asked for a story that includes dragons. We'll see if the next generation gets her wish, as I begin yet another year of my life as a writer.