So after spending a couple of months thinking that my memoir might be the only book I ever write, and lamenting the fact that I never have good ideas for stories, today I started my first novel. I’m too nervous of its feebleness right now to want to even give you an elevator pitch, but it’s filling my mind. I suddenly understand what real novelists mean when they say that their characters talk to them. My protagonist is telling me what she wants.
And it’s all very scary and weird, and it feels fabulous. I’ve literally never written fiction before in my life, so this is uncharted territory. I’m probably going to screw it up. But I feel like my brain opened up and swallowed my boring life, covering it in a fantasy. I take my kiddos to school, wash the dishes, nurse the baby, all with my girl’s fate floating through my mind. I also realized that I can confess things in fiction that I would never be able to say in real life, and play it off because it’s fiction; it’s not real.
I think this might be tied to two things: 1. forcing myself to blog every day, and 2. rapid fire fiction copy edits for Filles Vertes Publishing. I’ve been reading a lot of novels lately!
