I Wrote A Novel!

I've been writing my own things since I was seven years old, when I wrote my first poem that wasn't an assignment for class. My father took that funky little poem with it's not-always-exactly-rhyming lines and called each of his six siblings and read the entire thing to them over the phone.

This, I thought, was powerful. This is what I want to do. Nothing else I did ever brought me that kind of reaction from my dad or my mom. So my future was chosen.

Of course, I mostly wrote short stories growing up, and the beginnings of novels. In college it was all short stories and expository pieces. When I went back to school to get my technical writing degree, what I wrote was even further removed from my dream of writing a novel.

But 20 years of writing user instructions and technical white papers and whatnot honed my writing skills in ways I hadn't expected. I am a better writer for having written and edited for high technology and science.

Finally, after a many-year hiatus of really trying to write anything, I asked my friend Deb for help.

"I have no ideas. There is nothing there," I told her over email.

"Okay," she said. She sent me another message: "'She thought she saw a pointed ear peeking out from underneath his long hair. But no, that wasn't possible.' Start with that."

Start with that? How was I supposed to start with those two sentences? What kind of novel starts with those two sentences?

Why, an urban fantasy, of course. One with humor in it (which kind of faded away as I got all intense further in the book) and action in it (which is all mostly at the end) and lots and lots of dialogue (which is all over the place). I've spent four to four and a half months writing this novel and this morning, 44 years after I wrote my very first poem on my own, I finished the first draft of my first novel.

I'm not sure this fact has exactly set in yet. I'm not feeling all jump up and down or anything. I'm just feeling really cool. Maybe when I print it out to read it over for the first time, I'll get that desire to jump up and down and yell. (I barely read anything I wrote previously unless I needed a detail.) What I do know is I feel it's about damned time I wrote something again, and about time I wrote a novel. So it's not the romance novel I thought I'd be writing; I hope to have some of that in the final version. It is a return to my science fiction and fantasy roots, however.

I made it easier by setting it in Seattle, which I still mostly know, and made my main character live in my favorite old apartment. She has two close girlfriends, as I do up there, but they are definitely different from my girlfriends. She, however, is like me in a variety of ways, both internally and externally. She doesn't look like me, but she's a freelance writer and editor who wants to do more than what she's been doing (she wants to write magazine articles) and who has been pursuing her authentic self for most of her life. Is it a rule that your main character in your first novel is like you?

Now, when I go back to rewrite and revise, I'll get to know my novel better. Until now, it's been fast and easy writing. Next I'll have to really get to know my characters and add layers and depth and all of that. I'll have to work, just like in a real relationship.

But that is all for next week. For now, I can bask in the fact that I, a very late bloomer, have written my first novel. I think I deserve a present!