My Awesome Day

This week has been a milestone one for me although few people know why I am celebrating. Since last April I have been working on my most ambitious writing project ever--a novel. Yes, I have stepped out, up, all over the place to write a historical fiction piece centered around the Loyalists in the American Revolutionary War.

For those of you who don't know the term, Loyalists refers to those who remained loyal to the British in 1776 and beyond, eventually finding their way to Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario for the most part. My forebears were among that number; hence, my interest in just what happened or might have happened.

This has been a huge project for me, someone who likes to do short creations for the rush on finishing and the excitement of starting the next new thing. I started my journey by buying a very helpful book about the nuts and bolts of writing a novel and getting it published after our trip to Hilton Head last March, where I found in a wonderful Borders store the perfect how-to book. I needed to know about chapter length, spacing, organizing, types of books, and a million other detail-oriented topics, not to mention about finding a topic for my creative outpouring.

I am a lifelong lover of the creative word as many of my readers will know--remember my 1500-book library?--so that this is a natural progression for me now that I have the time to do it and have learned not to let life get in the way. I remember very clearly sitting on my porch reading a wonderful Children's Lit book by Jean Little and feeling tears welling with the absolute need I had to be able to write like her. And, of course, I did little about it, even having taken a writing course and having had excellent feedback from my professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. I was a teacher, a mother of two wonderful kids and wife to my very own Prince Charming, all of which filled my life. I had no time to write.

Or maybe, more likely, I didn't bother to make the time to write. You know, we women are pretty good at filling our lives doing things for others, and I was no exception.

Over the past year, after my son said to me last March when we were discussing my dream, "Mom, you're sixty years old, you're healthy, you have the time. If you don't do it now, when will you?" all that changed. I have since learned to guard my morning writing time and have stuck to writing three pages a day, five days a week as much as humanly possible, although I did take a three-month hiatus through the nightmarish move time last fall, only starting again in January. Mornings are my best time to write and I absolutely love the energizing feeling of accomplishment I get when the day's pages are done. Conversely, when the muse forsakes me and I just cannot do it (a rare thing) I beat myself up for the rest of the day. I am a person who needs accomplishment for self worth.

This writing marathon has meant far less time for writing my beloved blog and I am sorry for that as marrying my very own pictures to words is some of my best fun.

For today, then, the announcement is that on March 5, Wednesday, I completed my first draft, a wonderful length of 100,623 words or 384 pages in its rough draft format and I am elated. Following the advice of my how-to book and, by now, my own intuition, I printed, saved and saved again, stored one copy offsite and am now going to let it sit for three months before I go at the revisions. This will allow me to get some perspective when I reread the thing and I'll know better what needs to be revised. In the meantime, I am working on short pieces which I will begin submitting to contests and publishers. The most exciting thing? I have no fear of the inevitable rejections I'll face; in fact, I welcome them as necessary steps along my path to publication.