Motherhood and Writing Novels
In the early 2000’s I returned to Base Camp 1.
A shift in our world happened. We moved to a new town. My hometown in Louisiana. A place I said I’d never return to as I peeled out of my parents’ driveway at 18, heading for LSU and any city that wasn’t here. See ya suckers. I’ll never be back! Cut to: My husband and I loading up our two littles and moving back.
I heard a writing coach speak at a local college and I hired him to help me write my next novel. He had a revolutionary way of writing (please insert heavy sarcasm here.) His trick: writing a novel on poster boards. Y’all I can’t make it up. And, you guessed it, I did it. I wrote a first draft on poster boards. (There are so many emojis I want to insert here.) Anyway, I then realized I no longer had the time (or the space!) to deal with that novel. Two small babies 18 months apart proved to be more of a distraction than I anticipated. Ha.
I was still in the “I can handle it all” denial phase of motherhood.
That is until I took my oldest daughter to school one day (at age 3) with her baby sister strapped in the car seat next to her, dropped her off, and promptly got a call from her teacher that she’d walked in bare footed. I’d forgotten to put her shoes on. As the mom who can handle everything, this was devasting. I told them I’d go home and bring her shoes back up to school. But oh no, this was Montessori. No need to come back – it would just upset her. See, she’d just gotten to the point where she’d let go of my leg in order to walk in on her own. I was under strict orders to stay in the damn car. Anyway, my daughter had to go to the lost and found and pick out a pair of shoes to wear at school all day. Fine. Except she had a sensory perception disorder that would send her into fits if the slightest odd fabric touched her skin. Seriously. Tags, florescent lighting, and toilets that flushed automatically were the bane of her existence. But you know what? I think being in someone else’s shoes all day may have cured her.
Isn’t that usually the case?
Anyway, I did realize I may need to slow down, refocus. So, that poster book never really got off the ground (literally.)
But my babies grew up and got their drivers’ licenses and suddenly the house was empty. I needed a new distraction. Something to keep me from chewing my fingernails off every time one of them drove away from me. I know! I’ll write another book.
I went back to the formula I knew and found a continuing education class on creative writing. The idea for my next novel hatched while I was driving home one day alongside a train track. A train was next to me blowing its whistle as I neared my turn. There were no flashing lights or bars at this crossing. I stopped but I saw a woman in my mind in a truck, wearing a wedding gown, who didn’t stop. She tried to beat the train and failed. That kicked off a whirlwind of questions that would lead me to my third book.
I wrote and edited and polished my mystery. Then it was time to enter the pit of hell Base Camp 2, querying agents. If you want to be traditionally published, you need an agent. They are the gatekeepers. So I started making my list. No more paper and SASE’s, now it was all done online. No more books listing the current agents, now there was Query Tracker and Manuscript Wishlist and Publisher’s Marketplace websites. It was overwhelming, but I pulled up my big girl pants and went in.
And that’s when things got crazy…
Next week I’ll show a timeline of what querying agents looks like and one of my all time favorite rejections.
Cheers until next time!