In the Begining...

Has this ever happened to you…? That, one morning you wake up after having a dream… and the story follows you all through your daily routine? In fact, you keep thinking about it all during your commute to work, and it’s still in your mind when you are driving home? Well, that’s how I started writing my fleet of novels. I have an overactive imagination since forever and was a world-class day-dreamer in school. But I always had reoccurring fantasies involving my book’s theme, and that last vision just clicked something in my mind. It had fused all the previous singular dreams together and formed them into something solid. I had never written anything since my early-teenager angsty poetry period. But when I went home that evening, something magical happened.

Me: “Hey, I think I might start writing again…” Him: “That sounds cool!”

AND WITH THAT LEVEL OF UNBRIDLED SUPPORT… I started typing out the initial few lines of what is now the first draft of my inaugural book at the start of April 2017. And… my writing platform of choice was (*drumroll*)… the draft section of Yahoo mail. Yes, Yahoo mail. Ohmygosh, the amount of work I lost from drafts not being saved correctly, never mind the fact that anything I worked on had absolutely no formatting… But, I was so inspired just typing away and unfurling the story from my mind that I was happy to be putting the words out anywhere.

I kept general storyline direction notes saved in FaceBook messenger, and chapters wrote in Yahoo mail. That was where I started out. There was a mixture of ALL the verb tenses and a distinct lack of knowledge of which character’s POV to be writing in. But within those early attempts of putting letters onto a page, I was hooked. In retrospect, those first three chapters took me WEEKS to write. Whereas by the third, fourth, fifth book, I was confident enough to write a chapter in a night, when inspired. I don’t even think I moved to Microsoft word until… near enough the first book’s end. But in a way, it was a blessing in disguise because I used to have to keep rewriting chapters and paragraphs that were lost and never recovered. Which helped me build and develop onto the scenario that I was reclaiming from memory. (Editing and formatting that book was no walk in the park! 🙄 ) Not, that it mattered! I was so in love with my characters and the storyline that I would often do rewrites while in work and being sad THAT THERE WAS NO MORE CHAPTERS LEFT TO READ.

I was sad that there were literally no words left to continue. I just wanted to keep reading on to see what happened next… But nothing had happened so far, because… I hadn’t concocted the storyline yet!!! All I had was the bones of a story, and even by the end of the first draft, that skeleton was still fairly scrawny. Now that lil bitch has a bit of a badonkadonk. It just took four years of obsessive daily re-reading and an almost complete rewrite on the second draft.

And… I loved every single minute of it.