I'm Writing a Book

I am writing a book. For a long time, I didn’t tell anyone outside of my family because it felt like a dirty secret, like something you should keep to yourself. I thought I knew what everyone else would think. That I had no chance of getting a book published. That I was delusional. That it wouldn’t be any good.

But eventually, I decided to tell people anyway. My reasoning was that it would raise the stakes for quitting. After all, I figured the only thing more embarrassing than telling people you’re writing a book is telling them you gave up writing a book.

These double-sided pages are the result of a single draft, outlining, and world building over three years.

So, I told people. And no one said any of the things that I worried they were thinking (even if a handful of them thought it). In fact, people were overwhelmingly supportive. And now that I’ve been working on my book for almost eight years, and seriously for three, people just seem to accept that writing is both something that I do and part of who I am.

“How’s the book coming?” people sometimes ask. And I usually give them a short, vague answer because not only am I not sure how much they really want to know, it’s hard to do otherwise. It’s not like a home remodel where you can tell someone, “Just finished roughing in the plumbing,”* or “We installed the cabinets today,” and the other person will know exactly what you mean.

Visually, the writing process just looks like a time lapse video of me sitting in front of my computer in multiple versions of the same elastic-waisted pants. And progress can be hard to explain when sometimes it feels like one step forward and two steps back.

This website is for the (probably few) long-suffering, curious souls who, when they ask, “How’s the book coming?” genuinely want to know**.

*I don’t exactly know what this means.

**I’m aiming low for post frequency—once a month—because I’m not trying to beat any algorithms to reach ten people instead of two.

Writing Timeline So Far

• February 2017: Started writing about 30-60 minutes per day

• February 2017 - August 2021: Read a bunch of craft books and finish one full draft and one full rewrite (they are almost completely different stories)

• August 2021: Begin working with a developmental editor and treat the time and investment as education in writing

• August 2021 - January 2022: Work on world building and story development, getting anxious to start drafting

• January 2022 - August 2022: Turn in 83,000 words to my editor (easily 3x that if you count what I don't turn in), but several are me having to redo chapters that were not working. Keep 37,000 in the first draft. Make the tough decision that the end product will be better if I go back and re-work my outline.

• September 2022 - September 2023: Spend an entire year re-working the outline with feedback from my editor and critique partner. The end result is a fifty-seven page scene-by-scene outline of my multi-POV story that I feel much more confident and excited about.

• September 2023: Start writing again! The outline has given me a lot more confidence in the story. I also am having to rewrite fewer chapters, so the detailed oultine feels like a more efficent process (if you ignore the fact that it took me a year to write). At this point, I am writing about fifteen to twenty hours per week.