It Begins - The Road to Publication

            The most exciting thing in my life right now is trying to decide if that yellow nail polish I just bought looks a little too much like a bodily fluid. Or a fungus of some kind on my toes. Or the possibility of publication. Wait, yeah. That. That’s the most exciting thing in my life right now.

            My dream is to write. I’ve been putting in time on a novel and altogether this year, across three different drafts, I’ve written well over 100,000 words. With this newest storyline, every day I’ve written I’ve gotten no less than 1,000 words for the day. And that’s not good enough.

            I have several writers I follow on Twitter and one in particular, I admire greatly. Not just because of her work, but for the obstacles she’s overcome along the way. She puts out roughly three books a year and recently on Twitter, she’s been tweeting her word count. Someone like me latches on to that like water in the desert. Within the last couple of days, her tweets reveal that she’s writing about 7,000 a day, if I’ve been reading correctly. Yesterday, I got just above 4,000 and that was between two different projects. I’m getting there but I need to move faster.

            It’s amazing how certain people telling you that you can do something make you feel as if you really can and then some, especially when the person in question is not known for being encouraging. That’s why I have two projects going now. I wish I could have been working on this all year, but I had to go through two other drafts before I came to the storyline the way it is now. And the way it is now is the way I want to publish it. I finally found a way to combine two separate worlds that I love and make it authentic. That was when I had that amazing day and wrote 12,000 words. I threw out the thirty page prologue in twenty-four hours and the rest of it has been steady coming. But like I said, that’s not good enough.

            I don’t know if you, my lovely reader, saw the story on CBS last week about the woman who saved her house through self-publishing. Her family had hit rock bottom and were on the verge of losing their house. So she started writing, along with her husband, and they managed to make their $1,200 payment for the month. Or was it $1,600? Either way, you get it. The person who suddenly encouraged me saw that and even though she thought I already had something of a certain length that I could publish through Amazon, she got me to thinking about it. I wrote a blog not too long ago that I wasn’t going to worry about how I published (or dressed up) my books. I wasn’t too that point  yet. Well, suffice to say, that’s changed.

            The main story, tentatively titled Blood Shadows, is nowhere near ready to see the light of day. I just hit the 50,000 word mark with it Sunday and that’s only half of where I want to be when it’s done. And besides that, the story itself is just getting started. I honestly feel that what’s happened so far is just the beginning, that there’s so much more to do before I can even think about trying to publish it. In the meantime though, there is something else I can do.

            Some of my friends may recall a character named Jessica, mother of one of the characters I’ve been writing for more than ten years at this point. I’m 22, figure that one out, but anyway. It comes out in the first book, as it always has draft after draft, world change after world change, about the skeletons in her family closet. There is a story there. How Jessica went from being a kid to being this character’s mother is the story. I wouldn’t say it could be novel length, but maybe novella. That’s roughly 40,000 words, one hundred pages. And there’s my start.

            Jessica’s not the only mother who went through some shit before her daughter came along, or even after. The side project that I’m focusing on right now is the one I hope to see go to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing SOON. Not Jessica, but another mother. Another woman who’s been through hell and back for her kid. I seem to like that theme.

            Our stories begin with our parents, before we’re ever born. First comes Mary, the one who gave birth to a reincarnated Queen, and then comes Jessica if all goes well. I suppose this is my way of announcing that I’m going to try my hand at the publishing world, as soon as I finish writing Mary’s story. And hopefully this will build up some love for the world so that when Blood Shadows is finally done, there’s some anticipation for its publication.