AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVELS discussion
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A Veil Removed
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
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Well, I am so glad you are writing as Im enjoying this series so very much, it took courage and you did it, YEA
Hi Michelle! Thanks for sharing this glimpse into your life.
Betty wrote: "Well, I am so glad you are writing as Im enjoying this series so very much, it took courage and you did it, YEA"Thanks, Betty! I'm so glad you found your way to the series, too!
Debbie wrote: "Hi Michelle! Thanks for sharing this glimpse into your life."You're welcome, Debbie! Thanks so much for taking the time to read it!
I completely love that you wrote fan fiction about Jo traveling to your time period to be friends with you. Completely. Love.
Mod
"Well, forty came and went."
I hope you begin one of your novels someday with that. :)
Thanks, Michelle, for sharing all this. I too loved Louisa May Alcott as a girl (I was perplexed at how you pronounced Phoebe in one of her novels), and I too had a hard time getting out from "terrible" as I thought / think of my first attempts at creative writing. So glad you kept at it!
Connie wrote: "I completely love that you wrote fan fiction about Jo traveling to your time period to be friends with you. Completely. Love."Thanks, Connie. I think you and I must be kindred spirits!
Martha wrote: "I love this line:"Well, forty came and went."
I hope you begin one of your novels someday with that. :)
Thanks, Michelle, for sharing all this. I too loved Louisa May Alcott as a girl (I was pe..."
Ha! Yes, that would be a good opening line, wouldn't it?
Glad you kept writing past your initial doubts, as well!
I love your sense of humor! I am still waiting for the courage to sit down and write (and I passed forty many moons ago!)
Linda wrote: "I love your sense of humor! I am still waiting for the courage to sit down and write (and I passed forty many moons ago!)"Thanks, Linda! You can do it! Even if no one ever reads it (though they probably will), there's so much joy in creating something out of nothing!
Last week.
No, actually, that’s a hard question.
As a kid, I never really thought of myself as a writer. I was more of a reader. I loved reading and always, always, always had a book in my hand . . . or under the desk . . . or in my sleeping bag on a camping trip . . . or . . . you get the picture.
My greatest Christmas present ever was a set of Louisa May Alcott books, which I absolutely cherished. I read them over and over, and then one day decided to try my hand at fan fiction, before that was even a thing. Unfortunately, these little attempts were terrible. They mostly just rambled along until they eventually petered out and died, I think mostly because I was obsessed with working time-travel into it somehow.
Yes, in every story, Jo March would inevitably time-travel to the 1980’s, where she would meet and befriend a girl her age (me, of course). Maybe you’re thinking that this so far doesn’t sound too bad... But the story would fall apart because Jo was predictably curious about this new world she found herself in, and the modern girl was always disappointingly unable to explain how anything worked—like a microwave or a car, for example. So the stories just sort of sadly withered.
In high school and college, I was a great essay writer, and many of my teachers encouraged me to become a writer, but that seemed too terrifying, so I decided to flee to medicine, which I was also sort of interested in. Because becoming a doctor doesn’t sound difficult or scary at all, does it?
At any rate, I started as a bio/pre-med, which I really did find interesting, but after two years, I started to notice that I didn’t quite have the same level of passion for the science that my peers did. What I was feeling really passionate about, however, was a Victorian lit class I happened to be taking at the time. When I allowed myself to be honest, I knew is where I really belonged. Eventually, I took the plunge and switched my major to English Lit (but notice I still didn’t have the courage to do creative writing?).
I then sashayed my way out into the world and got all of the jobs one usually gets with an English lit degree: waitress x4, calligrapher at a convent, proofreader at Amoco Oil reading patents of different oil blends (yawn), customer service at a lithography firm, admissions director in a crumbling nursing home, etc. You get the picture.
I always kind of wanted to write a novel, but more as a way to vent about whatever was going on around me. Thank God I didn’t have the courage or the time at that point because novels written as therapy have the unfortunate tendency to not be all that good. As it was, I got married and had kids and then threw myself into being a stay-at-home mom. All thoughts of writing, beyond a clever email or a thoughtful birthday card, went out of my head. I took comfort in the admonition of one of my previous college professors, who had told us that no one should write a novel until they’re at least forty!
Well, forty came and went.
Then in 2012, my oldest was diagnosed with ADD and the second with a different mild learning disorder. It was a bit of a wake-up call for me, and I promptly quit all of the volunteer positions and committees that had somehow filled up my free time over the years. It turns out that this knee-jerk reaction may have been a little extreme, however, because getting the kids the help they needed didn’t take as much time as I thought it was going to. So then I was strangely left with a giant glut of time. My thought was that I could either get a job, go back to volunteering, or . . . perhaps write the novel I always wanted to write. I stewed on this for a really long time, but when four different people from four different parts of my life out of the blue suggested I write a book, I decided it was the sign I was looking for.
What followed was a big gargantuan novel—a sort of coming-of-age story of a young woman in the 1940s in Chicago. I gave it to family and friends to read, and I’d like to believe they actually enjoyed it. One of them commented that it was “like a real book.” (I don’t know what that they exactly meant by that, but I decided to graciously accept it as a compliment.) Many people asked if I was planning on trying to publish it. At that point, though, I can honestly say I hadn’t thought that far. I really just wrote this thing as a personal challenge—to see if I could sit in a chair every day and finish a novel. But now that I had achieved that, I needed some new challenge, which naturally seemed to be to try to get it published. This started me on a whole other journey, however, which is a little bit different than just being a writer. It’s a whole universe unto itself, and I find myself sometimes as out of water as poor Jo March was in the 1980s.
It turns out that that gargantuan novel never got published, but it was my vehicle to another world, which, six novels later, I’m still trying to navigate.
(And don't forget - each day I'll be randomly drawing a name from the comments to win one of my books!)