My Journey

My Journey To Finishing My First Book.

I’ve done it!! I’ve finished my first book. So I thought I’d share a little of my journey on how I got to this point in my life. I’d love to tell you that I had always planned to be a writer, that there was never any other path for me. But that’s just not true. I think it rarely is. Life gets in the way of dreams like that and writing was just that for me… a dream. When I was younger I devoured books, losing myself in story after story. Hoping that one day someone would lose themselves to one of mine.

It was something I was never able to pursue. I had three beautiful children young and they deserved everything I could give them. So I put aside my dreams of writing and throw myself into a career that would help me provide all those things. Until life happened once again, knocking my foundation out from under me. Taking with it that career I had spent years building. After years of therapy to finally get to a point where I could ask myself “What do I do now?”. I quickly came to the realization that this was an opportunity for me to do anything I wanted and I wanted to write.

Being the A type personality that I am I planned out every little detail and by chapter 3 it had lost all creativity for me. So I shelved it, sure I was just a shitty writer. For 4 years I full heartedly believed that. Until I came across an author on YouTube talking about the different types of writing styles there are. She helped me understand that there was no one size fits all in writing. As it turns out I’m a “plantser”, a pantser and a planner. This knowledge changed everything for me. It also helped me to understand that what works for me may not work for you and vice versa. I now know that I am not a linear writer, I write the scenes as they come to me and put them together as I finish chapters or acts. I won’t lie, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was putting the words inside my head to paper.

Armed with this knowledge I set out to start again. This time I stuck with it, if something didn’t work I changed it. If things needed tweaking I tweaked them. I spent the next two years learning my writing style. As well as teaching myself how to write. Just because I could write a mean email didn't mean I knew how to write an engaging story. Now that I gave myself the ok to fail things got easier and the story came to life. I could feel my character's heartbeat within the words on the page. So as I watched their lives play out in my mind's eye I tried to find a way to do them justice.

I still learn something new every time I sit down to write. Whether it be about writing, my style, or myself. That’s my journey in a nutshell. If you’ve stayed around this long I want to thank you and I hope you stick around as I move forward. I like to get to know each and everyone of you, I promise not to bombard you with excess information. My newsletter should be up and running, I’m also working on getting my discord up so we can all converse. And again I’d like to thank you for stopping by.