It has always been my ambition to be an author. I think at some point I must have nudged that dream into the category of 'fantasy', together with my other lifelong ambition to be besties with Kirsten Dunst circa. Bring It On. It's only relatively recently that I've thought, 'Hey, I could actually do this!' (Be an author, that is. I feel like Kirsten just isn't the same anymore. That ship has sailed.) So I wrote a book. It's called Half a World Away. It's a romance of the Katie Fforde variety, perhaps for a slightly younger generation (no offence Katie, I totally read your books, but I'm not sure many other people my age do). Of the several people I gave it to for general feedback, I think maybe three people actually finished it. No, four. And the feedback I received was not overwhelmingly positive. I was broken. I didn't actually do Dawson Leery crying, but I felt like I could. It was a punch in the gut.
Picture that bit in the second Twilight movie where Bella stares out of a window for four months.
That was me.
Anyway, despite all of that, the fact remained that I had written a novel. A 104 000 word novel, no less, proving - if nothing else - that I could sit and write 104 000 words, something I never knew about myself. And then an idea came for a new book, something completely different, and although I had a wedding to plan (did I mention I'm not the wedding planning type? That's not exclusive to weddings, actually. I am not good at planning), I couldn't help it. I started to write again.
The idea took root...I wrote the first few lines in an email to a colleague at work in June. I tried to put it off and focus on the wedding, but it was constantly niggling at me, like it wanted to be written. So when I got back from honeymoon, I started putting pen to paper. By 1 November, I had written 13 000 words. Then came Nanowrimo, and another 50 000. By January, the first draft was done at around 95 000 words. When I put the title at the top of the first page, I felt pretty good about myself. 'Hey girl,' I thought (my inner self sounds a little bit like feminist Ryan Gosling), 'You just wrote your second book. Congrats!'
Except this time around I knew I wasn't finished. I'd even saved the file on my computer with the file name '1st draft'. This time around, I was going to edit the beep out of this beep until it became the best beeping book you ever read in your whole beeped up life.
And so that's where you find me right now.
#amediting
Picture that bit in the second Twilight movie where Bella stares out of a window for four months.
That was me.
Anyway, despite all of that, the fact remained that I had written a novel. A 104 000 word novel, no less, proving - if nothing else - that I could sit and write 104 000 words, something I never knew about myself. And then an idea came for a new book, something completely different, and although I had a wedding to plan (did I mention I'm not the wedding planning type? That's not exclusive to weddings, actually. I am not good at planning), I couldn't help it. I started to write again.
The idea took root...I wrote the first few lines in an email to a colleague at work in June. I tried to put it off and focus on the wedding, but it was constantly niggling at me, like it wanted to be written. So when I got back from honeymoon, I started putting pen to paper. By 1 November, I had written 13 000 words. Then came Nanowrimo, and another 50 000. By January, the first draft was done at around 95 000 words. When I put the title at the top of the first page, I felt pretty good about myself. 'Hey girl,' I thought (my inner self sounds a little bit like feminist Ryan Gosling), 'You just wrote your second book. Congrats!'
Except this time around I knew I wasn't finished. I'd even saved the file on my computer with the file name '1st draft'. This time around, I was going to edit the beep out of this beep until it became the best beeping book you ever read in your whole beeped up life.
And so that's where you find me right now.
#amediting
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