I will be honest I hate writing about me sections. The words just won’t come to me with regards to my background. As Toby Keith said, “I wanna talk about me”.

The writing bug bit me when I was eleven years old. It started with my reading of Our Town by Thornton Wilder in English class. As of today, I haven’t written a single play but I have written stories. I wrote some short stories in high school and even started a literary magazine to publish them in. I had a fan. A boy in my English class that sat in front of me. When we were done with work, I would pass him what I had written. I was scared at first. I was bullied and it worried me he might laugh at my baby. He didn’t he kept wanting to read more.

I often wonder why I didn’t write while in college. I chose to go down a different path and graduated with a degree other than English. After I graduated and got married, I was writing again in my late 20s. I send some stories to some friends and then they passed them around to others. The stories were well liked. I look at them now and think wtf was I thinking. The stories were raw and unpolished. Not one bit of editing into them.

There were a few things that went on in my life once I turned 30. I was working in a library and decided to get my Masters Degree in Library and Information Science. When I graduated, I took a position as a children’s librarian. This is when my husband and I decided to have a child. For us it wasn’t as easy as we were led to believe. Long story short, it took seven years, two miscarriages and three medical procedures to have our little girl. Needless to say going through all this, my writing wasn’t on the back burner. It was on totally different stove. However, the dream of being an author never left.

In November 2016, I did something crazy. I participated in NanoWriMo. What’s that? I wrote 50k of words in the month of November. If a certain David Bowie and Queen song is running through your head right now I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it’s the one by Billy Joel. It was November 30th and I turned in my final word count at 11:57 pm. I think I wrote most of that day trying to making it across the finish line. If I had been running a race, I would have been the one that was panting, sweating and willing herself across.

I had basically finished the first draft of my novel. Applaud here if you like to but I still had a long way to go. Little did I know that now the hard part comes. The dreaded editing was about to begin. This is where you go through your novel sentence by sentence. Your eyes are privy to all those glaring mistakes you ignored while writing, such as changing a minor characters name half way through the book. It has to be done. You never ever want to put out there a raw copy of your novel. A novel is like a diamond. First created it is rough and uncut. You need to shape it and polish it, bring out the shine. When finished, it looks gorgeous sitting in that ring or hanging on that necklace. This is what editing does for your novel. It makes it shine.

Now is 2023, I am still editing. I have run my novel through a computer program and found out things like how much I use the word “really”. It’s a lot people…a lot. I am getting there. I was pricing some editors for my next step which is going to be getting it developmentally edited. This is where someone looks at the story itself and makes sure things are consistent and readers aren’t tilting their heads wondering what the hell my characters are doing.

I am still on the balance beam of traditional or self-publishing. More and more I’m leaning towards self-publishing. I’m still on the fence about it. We shall see.