Some Musings and Updates
After a very eventful summer, I decided to take some time off from writing so as to prevent burnout. Unfortunately, a dull nagging in my brain has been yelling at me for the past three weeks to write and I feel like a useless sod if I don’t. I tried to keep going, but everything I wrote felt insincere so I forced myself to stop and instead started on an audiobook for The Chaos Child. You would think reading out loud would be super easy, but so far I only have two chapters recorded and I’ve discovered the resurgence of a childhood lisp. But I’m still trucking along and should hopefully have a completed audiobook before Christmas. I also plan to start editing To Private Ford Rayburn, the first book in a duet. The goal is to have the book published by the end of next year, with the second book (which is 70% done) to follow a year later.
It’s very strange to me to be writing that sentence, because The Chaos Child took five years to write and two years to actually publish. The Chaos Child was actually born of an idea I had in high school which my husband and I turned into a play-by-post writing exercise when we were in college. After not writing for many years due to personal issues, I picked up the play-by-post in 2017, after having my first child, and in a frenzy wrote the first half of The Chaos Child. I then sat on it for a while and finished a working draft a year later. After getting some feedback from test-readers, I was convinced I would need to rewrite the whole second half of the book and, feeling discouraged, I did not touch it for three years. In 2022 I opened the document and was surprised to see that with a few minor edits and a few more scenes, I could finish the book without having to discard forty pages of writing. I finished the final draft within a week. It then took a whole year and a half to edit, sending it out to more readers, making more edits, learning how to publish, etc. etc.
Meanwhile I had started on two sequel books to The Chaos Child (more on those in the future) and started on what would be the bonus novella. Severely burned out on the Iron Fae world, but with a burning desire to keep writing, my husband suggested that I start on what would become To Private Ford Rayburn. To Private Ford Rayburn was once a parody story. I had come up with the idea in high school of a soldier serendipitously meeting the love of his life and getting married within a week, only for the two to be wrenched apart by fate and having to work their way back to one another. I wrote thirty pages of it in a red moleskin notebook before abandoning the idea. A couple of years later I was reminded of it and it became what I call ‘my bedtime story.’ Late at night, when I cannot sleep, I’ll dredge up a story and work through it to lull myself to sleep. These stories are my more outlandish ones, the ones I wouldn’t dare write down because of how absurd the concepts and themes are. The story of Ford and Marnie Rayburn was one where I could let my imagination run wild, where anything could happen, no matter how unrealistic. I felt safe letting absurdities happen knowing no one would ever read this story. And then my husband became interested.
To be Continued….