It Only Took a Dozen Years

but I finally have the first complete draft of my historical. I can't believe I even had the audacity to start something so big when I couldn't even write a proper scene. I have Peggy (pictured below) to thank for teaching me all the basics and more. 

Sometimes I wonder what if I'd stuck with it, instead of working on shorts and a ton of nonfiction. Would it already be published by now? I honestly don't know. All I know that the path I took, concentrating on shorts, becoming a working writer, writing this story in fits and starts (not the ideal way to write a novel), somehow made me a better writer. I guess the 10,000 rule applies to everything. I still have a couple thousand to go.

I took a complete break from this book for about five years, while I worked on a contemporary novel (that one took 3 years to write, revise, and polish). When I placed 3rd in the novel category in the SCBWI Carolinas writing contest, I thought, oh, I could finish polishing in a few months. WRONG. The re-visioning/re-shaping itself took a year-and-half. The polishing took a couple of months. Finally it's ready for my beta fish readers. And my hope is that they enjoy the story so much, they lose sleep over it.

This is a huge accomplishment for me, folks. I finally have a chance to have these characters take up residence in other people's heads. Hee hee.