While I was scouring the internet for inspiration for my first-ever blog post as a professional author, I stumbled upon this quote by Douglas Adams: “It takes an awful lot of time not to write a book.”
Ain’t that the truth?
I started writing my very first novel, Stepping Stones, on a challenge from one of my high school students back in 2016. She was going to participate in National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo) and all but double-dog-dared me to join her. Of course, I couldn’t say no, so I jumped in. She and I compared word counts and talked stories and, at the end of November, we both hit the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words. I had the bones of a serviceable story; all it needed was some polish.
And then it sat. And sat. And sat some more. I moved to a new, larger school with a student load about twice what it had been at my old school. I got a master’s degree. My husband and I adopted a teenager from foster care, and she wanted a dog, so we adopted a dog, too. COVID
hit, and so did the absolute circus of online/hybrid seat-of-the-pants “teaching.” The isolation and non-traditional schooling was, to put it mildly, not a good fit for our kid, so we began navigating the abysmal mess that is pediatric mental health care in the United States. Life got in
the way – or that’s what I told myself. I mean, it takes an awful lot of time not to write a book, right?
I don’t know what the catalyst was, really, for dusting off the file. Maybe it was the story of Minnie Payne, the 90-year-old woman who became the oldest person to earn a master’s degree at the University of North Texas. Maybe it was the string of stories of senior citizens climbing
mountains and running marathons. All I knew is that I would never be too old to write a book, but I might someday be too dead. So, after about 10,000 edits, I took a deep breath and asked my Facebook friends if anyone wanted to be my beta reader. I sent my manuscript to ten of
them and got overwhelmingly positive feedback, much to the surprise of my deep-seated imposter syndrome! I put out a few feelers to traditional publishers, almost learned the hard way about the pitfalls of vanity presses, and finally bit the bullet and decided to just publish it myself.
So what’s the moral of the story? There are two: (1) You are never “too old” and (2) there’s no such thing as finding time, only making time. (More about that in my next blog post!)