Hello guys, gals, and non-binary pals!
I’ve mentioned more than once that I’ve been working on this series for ten years. And today I thought I might give a rundown of how I got from 2011 to 2021.
Basically it all started when I discovered National Novel Writing Month. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a yearly event in November where writers from all over the world try and write 50,000 words in a month. It’s a crazy busy event with tons of people and activities and games and all of that. And, at seventeen, I felt like I should do this. But I had no story. And no practice writing original novels, because I’d only ever written fanfiction.
So like the giant, lovely nerd I am, I decided to do a practice run in October of 2011. In one night I came up with a story idea with the help of friends, wrote the outline, outlined the second book, outlined the third book, and then got to work.
I wrote book 1 in two weeks with a vastly different plot and title.
I wrote book 2 in less than ten days. Also with a vastly different plot and title.
I then continued to write book 3 and got halfway through when I ran out of steam.
So in total, in November, I wrote over 150,000 words, and in October I wrote 76,000 words. My first two and a half original novels.
Of course I wanted to publish them, but I also wasn’t sure how to go about that. So I put them away and started on other things. Then brought them out and revised them. Then tried to publish. Failed. Worked on other things. Revised them. Tried to publish. Failed.
Through all of this, I got older. I went to college, I moved to China, I met new people, I grew as a person and as a writer. And eventually I made some significant changes involving the number of characters. Then I decided I was done and I put it away, until I brought it back out with a friend of mine, a critique partner, who suggested that this was good, but it needed another couple of years.
I gave it another couple of years. And when I started writing this, on Scrivener, on my phone, at 2 in the morning at my lunch when I did night shift work, something happened and this book popped out.
And I needed to grow and become the person I am today to write this book because I needed to discover what it meant to me.
Now I have.
And I’m so excited to share it with you.
~Linn
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