Day One: Are you ready to write your first novel?

Hello, hello, fellow readers and writers! Thank you for reading this post, the first of this new blog that will be my companion as I fulfill a lifelong goal: to be a novelist.

Probably like many of you, I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since I first started thinking about such things. Perhaps your path has been similar: I wrote stories and poems in grade school and articles for the school newspaper in high school. I began college as a journalism major before switching to English, then got an M.A. in literary studies, which led to a job as an adjunct college writing instructor.

When our son was a baby, I stopped teaching for a while but was soon itching to do something. Somewhere I read the excellent advice to freelance writers to start small and start local. Our family had recently become vegetarian, and I loved to cook, so I asked a community food and wellness magazine if they could use a cookbook reviewer, and, to my amazement, they said yes. That job eventually led to a cooking column and articles in our local newspaper and several national vegetarian magazines, as well as a newsletter I wrote and published for several years.

Continuing to write about my interests and passions, I switched my focus to education when our son was school age, especially gifted education and homeschooling, and have published four non-fiction books and several articles on those topics. I continued to teach college freshman composition, technical writing and creative thinking, and I also worked with a terrific group of teen writers while our son was in high school. Then, last year, I wrote a children’s historical fiction novel, which is currently with a wonderful agent who is finding it a good home.

Yet, through it all and for reasons I can’t explain, I still feel that something is missing that keeps me from thinking of myself as a real writer: I have yet to write a full-length novel, although I have tinkered for years with ideas and timelines, plot synopses and points of view. Somehow, though, I never get past a handful of pages.

My first novel is in me and no longer content to stay there. The characters are begging to be born. I’m ready to hear their voices and welcome them into my life.

Day One. It is time. Are you ready for your own First Novel Project? Are you with me? Let’s do this together!