I remember the first time I finished writing a novel. I was twelve, probably, and it was about midnight, and I was cross-legged on the mattress of the trundle bed I slept on whenever we visited my grandparents in Indiana. I should have been asleep, I knew that, but I was so close to the end, and the story I was writing had taken a life of its own. It pulsed in my fingertips, and I had reached that writer’s equivalent of runner’s high where it felt that the words were somehow bypassing my conscious brain, going straight from thought to keyboard to word doc without me getting in my own way. It was almost euphoric as I wrote the last scene, the one that I’d been dreaming about for months. My characters were running and I felt my heartbeat quicken as though I was, too; I felt all the heartbreak and excitement and adrenaline as if it were my own, and it was, in a way. I wrote the last words.
And then it was done.
I realized my cheeks were wet. I had worked for several years on this story at this point. There was triumph, yes - I had just written a full novel for the first time. But I also felt the adrenaline comedown, and the question- what now?
The answer was editing, lots of editing. I shared my new book with some older writers I knew and got feedback for the first time (this was hard) and rewrote the first chapter about seventeen times (this was also hard). I started another book, Colonized, to give myself a break from the slog of editing, and I liked it so much that I wrote a sequel.
Then I took a break. A long break, so long I thought I had given up. Years went by. I wrote other books. But I still remembered that first book, those first characters, who had grown with me in a way.
This past Christmas I opened my laptop and pulled up my old draft. My little sister liked dystopian books and wanted another to read; I hadn’t bought a Christmas gift yet.
So for the first time in almost eight years, I read my first book. I remembered all the ways I had fallen in love with this story and fell in love again.
A decade after I finished, I finally published the first novel I ever wrote. IT’s a dystopian fiction story of defiance, love, selflessness, discovery, loyalty, escape. It’s called Fly Away.
I hope you love it, too.
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