Thursday, October 22, 2009

The trunked novel

I wrote a novel over the span of ten years. I started when I was barely out of the grasp of being a young adult myself and completed the novel a married woman with a baby. This novel has no title but I call it Emma - even though my Main Character is no longer named Emma (but one of my real babies is now!).

I lost the novel when a computer died and the 3.5" disk it was on failed. (Told ya... old school). One day while unpacking after a move I found a copy of the book I had printed out. The thrill of seeing those words again spurred me to type it back out and finish it. (I saved it on a hard drive, an external hard drive, a CD-ROM and a flash drive - in addition to have printed it out... I'm learning folks!)

Yet, once it was time to edit it, I had lost the spark that caused me to write it in the first place. I still love my characters, and I knwo they haven't said everything that needs to be said, but I had other voices calling for attention (and no, my mental illness begins and ends with clinical depression so it wasn't "those" kinds of voices) and begging to be written.

So this novel sits, completed and loved, awaiting major revisions. Someday I whisper... someday.

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