Rediscovering Dreams

When I was little, okay, even now that I’m older, you could find me with my nose buried in a book. Friends would come over and ask if I wanted to come out to play and usually, I would. But there were those times when I didn’t. I couldn’t, because I was so engrossed in the story, that if I were to leave right then, the world in which I had been living would no longer exist. I wanted to stay there in that land of imagination that the author had created just for me. It was a magical place, full of adventures, challenges to be overcome, and in the end, happily ever after. Those stories introduced me far away lands and places just around the corner, people who had done something great or were just like me and all of those books opened my eyes to all the possibilities the world had to offer.

I fell in love with words, but more than that, I fell in love with storytelling. I would make up stories and share them with my friends. If my real-life friends didn’t want to listen, I told them to my imaginary friends and stuffed animals.

I didn’t really pursue writing during my school years. I did take a journalism class in high school and did a little bit of writing in college. But then along came a professor who told me I couldn’t write and it pretty much shattered any hope that I had of ever doing anything with my writing.

Fast forward some years later and I found myself working as a technical writer for a tax software company. Definitely not the most exciting topic to write about. But it reawakened my writer’s brain, just a little. Some more years later and I jumped back into writing by participating in NaNoWriMo. In one month I wrote 50,000 plus words and wound up with a draft of a novel. I continued to tinker around with writing, mostly just a personal blog and journaling, but nothing that would allow me to call myself a “writer”.

Then the writer in me, who had been hiding away for all those years, popped up and said “Hey, remember me? Remember that draft you wrote? Yeah, it’s time to do something with that.”

I sat down and over the course of some months rewrote the draft and ended up with 85,000 words. I got in touch with an amazing developmental editor who went over the manuscript line by line and sent me back a bunch of notes. I’m now in the process of working through her notes; editing, cutting, and rewriting. It’s taking a little longer than I had hoped, but the one thing that’s come out of it all is the realization that I have always been a writer. It just took me a little while to get here.