Is This a Gift or a Curse?

Happy Halfway Mark!

Halfway mark of what, you ask? Why, of rewriting my first novel, of course! I know it doesn't mean much to any of you, but to me it's rather exciting. See, I originally started writing this story right after my freshman year of college. (Some of the characters and plot I had imagined back when I was still 12 or 13 years old.) So this story has literally pervaded more than two decades of my life.

In the days when I was only twenty pages or so into this narrative, I let my brand-new roommate read it (remember that, Abby?) And I remember she had questions and suggestions about it that just convinced me that she hated me for some reason. Yeah, I tend to blow things way out of proportion sometimes. Anyway, part of me decided that either I couldn't write very well, or my story was boring, and for awhile I was strongly tempted to abandon the entire project.

Obviously I didn't do that. I couldn't. There are times when I just have to get stories out of my head and onto paper, and this particular story refused to go away. (You can just imagine how tortuous this itch to write fiction was on my mission. I only lasted a few weeks in the MTC before I was using half of my journal writing time to work on a story. Hey, at least the story was about a missionary! A year into my mission I got obsessed creating this odd short story about my own life taking two different paths and I spent almost all of my study time working on it. I'm afraid I got a little distracted. My companion thought I was nuts, but luckily she also found it amusing and endearing.)

Well, I finished this first novel back in Sanders. I titled it Andie and gave a copy to my sister to read. Camie didn't get very far into it (life with young children is tough) but her husband, to my surprise, picked it up and raced through it. Then he proceeded to encourage and even badger me about my writing. Between Ryan's pestering me and Terence's unflagging support, I finally finished a sequel. Of course, my second novel was way better than the first. Kind of natural. But it has bothered me since, and I've always wanted the first novel to match up to the sequel a little better. So here I am, rewriting it. I took the hard way about it-- except for some small parts, I refused to even look at the old one, and I am just telling the story (which I know backwards and forwards) in my more experienced writer's voice. It's been a long, drawn out process, trying to fit this in around my kids.

This week I reached a horribly difficult part of my story. My main character is captured and sold into slavery, and since when I'm writing something I really have to immerse myself in the fake world, I had been really dreading this part. All month I have been trying to get through this chapter and just not having any success at all. Maybe one sentence would get written at a time. Finally, I had to give up and copy whole sections from the original.

(I dare you to try and be a happy mom while imagining you've been sold into slavery! It doesn't work very well.)

Still, I survived and the chapter is finished. Hooray for persistence! And here's to hoping I make it through the next 45,000 words sometime before my kids are adults!