Perspective: When counting words began to count.

A few years ago, I decided I needed to go back to school.  Yeah, I was getting old(er) and I thought to myself:  "Hey, You!  You're getting older!  Don't you think you should get an official degree?"

So, terrified beyond measure, I enrolled in the local community college, Valencia, and started on the path to enlightenment--or is that the path to edification?  Anyhow, it had been over 20 years since I last traversed the halls of academia, so I was not too surprised that I failed my math placement tests.

Yeah, I probably could have studied for them, but why bother?  I mean, math and I went way, way back, and we never had a great relationship.  So, I was rather pleased that I'd have to take the remedial math courses in order to carry on to College Algebra.  So I did.  I took two such math courses before any of my math counted towards a degree.  Doesn't seem at all fair, now does it?  Well, I suppose when you're old(er) and not so much wiser in the realm of Quadratic things, it is a necessary evil.

I attacked my general education requirements like a winning team attacks their ice cream sundaes.  Plowing through them until I was left with mostly my chosen degree classes.  Now, my advisor, at the time, warned me that I shouldn't take all those hard paralegal courses together like that.  She said they'd be too much and I had no gen-ed courses to act as a buffer to all the legal classes.  But I was undaunted by her warnings and again, I plowed ahead.

During that time, I was the chairwoman for a local charitable gala, I started homeschooling my daughter, and I still had my mother-wife-daughter duties.

One of the most annoying parts of the program was the requirements that were set forth by the state requiring all students in freshman and sophomore years to complete a minimum of 6,000 words per year.  Oh.  My.  God.  Six thousand words in one year.

I mean, how can one possibly fathom the awful savagery of it all?  Right?  If you are a college student, you feel me.

Of course, those 23 page research papers, the legal briefs, the explications, the speeches, the lit reviews all added up to a whopping SIX THOUSAND--or more--words per year.  Wow.

I thought I was all worded out by the end of those two-and-a-half years.  Yeah, I took over two years to get my paralegal degree.  See the paragraph above where I explain all the other things I was doing at the time!

But I got my degree in Paralegal Studies.  In fact, I graduated with a 4.0.  Then, I decided that I didn't really want to be a paralegal.  I'm more of a creative type of person.  I wanted to just...write.

So, I took a poetry class.  That was fun.  It sparked something in me that had been long-dormant.  It sparked my inner story teller.  It allowed me to just shut up and listen to the voices that are always in my head and give them a voice.

When I began writing Reset, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel.  I thought I had to have all my characters mapped out, the plot clearly diagramed in some weird mapping program, and a set writing schedule.

I had none of those things.

But, I did have the voices.  They wanted to be heard.  Tia Jameson wanted to tell her story.  So, I decided to just let her do that.

Then, one day, my dear friend, Jill, came over and we started discussing the hows and whys and whens of writing a novel.  Ugh.  I don't like that part at all.  She started saying things like:  "You have to get the arc of your novel.  Let's look at word count."

Arc?  Word count?  No...that sounds like work.

So, back to that whole word count thing.  Now I count them, I sure do.  Because that is what publishers and such do.  So, when in Rome...and so on and so forth.

Reset, contained 88,544 words before revisions.  By my rough calculations, that's 14 years worth of 6,000 word requirements!  After revisions and final edits, Reset was 80,068 words.  

The process of writing a novel was...well, very new to me.  One could even say it was...novel.  Ha.  Couldn't help it. :)  But putting it all into perspective, I'd write an 80,000 word novel over ten or twelve essays, explications, or briefs any day old day.

I now spend my days looking at that word counter at the bottom of the page.  I'm still trying to find the arc of my novel.  Maybe it's somewhere under the rainbow?

Perhaps it's waiting for me beside the pot of gold.

The Birth of a Novel.

I am so excited to share my first novel, Reset, with you all!

The concept for Reset came to me four years ago.  I had family visiting during spring break and I began furiously writing.  I wanted to get the story out as fast as it was coming to me.  One of my nieces and my daughter were reading each chapter as soon as I’d finish it.  Then my family left and went back to their respective hometowns and my novel was once again put on the back burner.

There were many factors as to why I didn’t finish it at the time.  The big one being quite simple—life.  It has a tendency of getting in the way.  I let it.  Of course, there was the simple fact that I was trying to get my teen-aged daughter through middle school while obtaining a difficult degree in paralegal studies.  There was also the fact that I was hugely involved with some local charities that were taking tremendous amounts of my time.  Let’s not forget that I have ADHD and tend to jump from one task to another, so fast the glasses shake in the kitchen—Squirrel!

Oh, sorry.  I got distracted.  Regardless of the excuses, Reset sat silently on a jump drive, waiting to be written.  I ignored it.  I acted like it didn’t exist.  I denied it the light of day, because I was too busy.

I was also petrified.  How could I possibly think that I could write anything that anyone would really want to read?  How could I be qualified to write one book, much less a trilogy?  All those doubts piled on top of the idea and squashed it like a ketchup packet in the glove box.

Sure, I met established authors who’d always just tell me:  “Just write.”  Okay.  Well, then.  Thanks for that nugget of golden knowledge plucked from the tree of life.  No kidding.  Just write.  Simple enough right?  No.  Not really.

It was like thinking about having a child.  It’s too soon.  I’m not ready.  Will I be a good parent?  Will my kid hate me?  Will others hate me when my kid is loud and annoying in a nice restaurant?  Do I have the time for a child right now?  Will I go broke having this child?  Am I truly qualified to be a parent?

Yeah.  The doubts were firmly entrenched in me.  So I studied the law, and I did quite well in my degree.  I graduated last summer with a 4.0.  I was one of only three people in my program with such high marks.  That seemed safe and easy compared to thinking about broaching the mountain of writing a novel.

But one of my English comp professors befriended me after I was done with the program.  She asked me to sit in on her poetry class.  Okay.  Sure.  Why not?  I had  graduated, but I was floundering for purchase in the new world of the educated.  So I did.  It wasn’t long after that I remembered I had a passion for writing.

I love the freedom that comes from writing.  Whether it’s poetry or fiction, I just love writing.  So that one little class reignited the dying spark of my writing.

After the poetry class ended, I began searching for the original version of Reset.  I couldn’t find it!  It wasn’t on the old laptop I had used four years ago, because we’d wiped it when it got sick.  Those nasty computer viruses.  Frantically I searched high, low, wide, and tall for the back up version of my book.

I finally found it on a backup hard drive and I printed it out.  There were only six chapters done.  With my newfound courage and confidence, I began re-writing Reset.  I got up to four chapters and I asked my dear friend, Jill Sebacher, to read it.

I wanted her opinion on whether or not it should be written in first or third person.  Jill reluctantly agreed to read it.  All the while she was praying that it was half-way decent.  She never agrees to read people’s books.  It’s just too difficult to tell someone what they wrote is crap.  Besides, we’d just become friends and she didn’t want to destroy our friendship by telling me I should consider writing the directions on shampoo bottles.  You know, lather, rinse, and repeat.  Riveting, I’m sure.

But she didn’t think it was crap.  She also wanted me to keep Reset in first person.  Switching it to a third person perspective would completely lose Tia’s voice.  I concurred and so I continued writing.  Jill pushed me mercilessly the entire way.  She wanted two chapters at a time to read—purely for content.  She was not in editor mode, or teacher mode.  She just wanted to enjoy it as it developed.

So that is how it began.  I liken writing a novel to being pregnant.  At first, the novel is but a seedling—an egg.  It doesn’t exist as a living breathing entity until it is fertilized and nurtured.  For nine months (more or less depending on the mother and child), that egg grows into a fetus, still living inside its mother.  That’s the writing phase.  It’s all creation.  The feeding and nurturing of your baby from within.

Then, BAM!  That baby is done cooking and out it comes.  Well, my dear friends. That is not the end of the stretch marks or the agony.  When was the last time someone handed out a user manual for raising a child into a good and proper human being?  Never?  Yep, that’s about right.

So the editing and revising phase is the time between the actual birth of the child to the time that child goes off to college.  That was the most brutal part for me.  I was not prepared for how hard it would be.  I simply had no idea that baby I had created could possibly be better.  What?  You mean my words didn’t sprout like manna from the heavens?  I’m not the next JK Rowling?  Really?  OMG.

So, yeah.  That happened.  It hurt.  Basically, it sucked.  If I’d known it would be so brutal, I probably wouldn’t have done it.  But I did.  And as brutal as it was, just like giving birth without pain killers, I think the end result here well justified the means.  Ultimately, us women always warn our friends when they are thinking of having a child.  We relay horror stories of the birthing process.  We describe how our lives (and bodies) will never be the same post baby.  But then we see that bundle of pure joy and we think…yeah.  I did good.  I made that.  Look everyone, I created something pretty awesome.

According to author John Green:  “Pain demands to be felt.”  Well, I concur.  But, pain also lessens and dulls with time.  In my case, not too much time.  However, I am perfectly okay with enduring the pain of revising and editing if I can offer my readers the best possible read.  I’m game for that.  Let’s do this.

So here I go.  I am embarking on Book 2 of my Reset Trilogy.  I go into this fully prepared.  My diaper bag is packed.  I am ready with a good bottle (or three) of wine and possibly a giant bottle of Aleve.  I know that all children are different.

This child may be a little schizophrenic or have multiple personality disorder.  Who knows?  Maybe I do.  Maybe, if you were paying attention…I just gave you a peek at how I will be approaching Resist.  Hmm…