This week I decided to shake things
up a bit and share something a little more personal with y’all. Sure, I am filled with stories about my crazy
boys that will no doubt make you laugh, but nothing is crazier to me than the
story of how I ended up writing books for a living.
Sometimes when I tell people that
I am an author, I feel like a bit of a fraud.
It may seem silly, but the truth is that when I was younger I absolutely
DETESTED writing. All through high
school and college, I dreaded any type of writing assignment and term papers
were the absolute bane of my existence.
I didn’t mind doing the research, but having to condense the information
and organize it into a coherent argument was something that I had no desire to
do. I would sooner have requested a
rousing game of bridge with my parents.
After I graduated from
Northwestern with a BS in Psychological Services, I briefly pursued a career in
Social Work, but found myself becoming too emotionally attached to my
clients. So I traded in Social Work for
the more corporate friendly Human Resources and spent thirteen fairly enjoyable
years working my way up the proverbial ladder.
I spent a lot of face time with employees and looked forward to
welcoming them to the company, helping them get settled and guiding them to
building their careers. Fairly early on,
I realized that I just signed myself up for a career that was riddled with
writing assignments. You wouldn’t think
that HR would be a career that would require a lot of writing, but it actually
does. I had to write policies,
newsletters, presentations, web page content and the dreaded disciplinary
actions.
Throughout the years, I was given
more and more of the writing assignments in my department and found that the
more practice I had, the easier it became.
Before I knew it, instead of feeling like a chore, writing became
something that I enjoyed doing. Imagine
that? While the subject matter of my
writing was rather boring, taking information and conveying it in a way to make
it easy for people to understand had somehow become a lot of fun to me.
After I had my second child, I
decided to be a stay at home mom. I had
no desire to fork over my entire salary for daycare and decided to make good on
my promise to stay home with my children if I could. (I had NO idea what I was getting myself
into, but that is a discussion for another time.) Once my younger son was about a year old –
and actually started to sleep - I found myself getting restless. I needed some kind of project for myself; something
that I could create. A few months later
I had a dream that I wrote a book. It
seemed like a crazy idea at the time, so I pushed it aside, dismissing the idea
as an early mid-life crisis. (Very
early!) But the idea just wouldn’t go
away and one day I found myself writing down my ideas. Before I knew it, I had outlined the entire
book!
If you have read my first book, French Twist, you already know that I
elected to write about the very interesting story of how my husband, Sebastien,
met and were married in six short months.
I happened to meet him in a bar, of all places, while I was living in
California. He had come over from France to work on a project for his company’s
US branch and within five weeks of meeting we were engaged and five months
after that we were married. Our
courtship was full of highs and lows and funny little stories. I decided take our story and turn it into
what is currently termed Chick Lit. It
is one of my favorite genres to read since it is filled with relatable,
charming women who take me on adventures and make me laugh. The story of how I met my husband has all of
these elements in spades, so why not write my own Chick Lit novel?
I thought it was a great way to start
writing because I didn’t have to craft the story myself. All that I had to do was tell it! It did not take me long to realize that
“just” telling the story wasn’t going to be so easy. I quickly learned that real life contains far
too many people than would be a reasonable number of characters in a book. If I included all of the people who were
actually involved in our story, the end result would have been too confusing
for readers to follow.
So, the next step was to condense
the characters and the events so that the main points of the story come
across. After doing this, I had a much
deeper appreciation for screenwriters who have to adapt books to the big
screen. There is just no way to keep
everything!
Once I had revised my cast of
characters and my plotline, I slowly began writing the first chapters. I started sending chapters to my sister to
read since she had experienced much of the content herself and she had read
more Chick Lit than any person I knew.
It was an added bonus that she could write well herself. For good measure, I had a couple of other
people read my book and gratefully accepted their notes as well. You would be surprised how easy it is to miss
simple typos in material that you had not only written, but read and reread
many times over. It just boggles the
mind!
The last thing that I needed was
a book cover. In addition to her talents
as an editor, my sister is a gifted artist.
(I often tell her that she got all of the good genes in the family. She; however, does not agree.) I gave her a few ideas for the cover and she
whipped it up for me in no time. I
couldn’t believe it! I now had all of
the elements of my book in place.
The interesting thing about
today’s world is that if you want to publish a book, you no longer have to shop
it around to various people and hope that someone will like your work –
especially if you are not quite sure that you want to be a full-time author. There are numerous websites where you can
self-publish your book and even more websites that offer tips and tools to help
you along your way. I am a huge fan of
Amazon, so I decided to go with the Kindle Direct Publishing Program for the
eBook and CreateSpace, an Amazon Company, for the hard copy. The entire process was user friendly: all it took was a little bit of elbow grease,
and a lot of help from my husband (he is a formatting genius), for French Twist to become a reality.
I still remember when I received
the proof of French Twist from
CreateSpace. I had just come back from a
beach vacation with my family - exactly one year after I had dreamt that I
wrote a book. As I held the book in my
hand, I took a moment to just stand and feel the weight of my accomplishment. Then a huge grin took over my face and I
jumped around, squealing like a little girl.
Not my most dignified moment, admittedly, but I deserved it!
Even though my days are fairly
chaotic as a mom of two boys, I somehow managed to write the second book in the
French Twist series, French Toast. In the second book, I delved much more into
the world of fiction, taking the characters based on me and my family and
putting them into completely imaginary situations. I have to say that it was much more
challenging, but also a lot more fun to write the second book. Though I found it more difficult to create
content from scratch, there is a great deal more freedom in writing fiction as
opposed to non-fiction. Especially when
you can make your family members do all kinds of crazy things!
Overall, writing has been a wonderful experience for me for
so many reasons. First and foremost, it
provides the flexibility that I need in order to take care of my children. Perhaps flexibility is a strong word. Pliability? Contortionability? Is that even a word? Let’s just say that there have been many
occasions when I have time to write, but inspiration just will not strike. Or I have fabulous ideas that are dying to
get out and this is the absolute moment that my son HAS to have me help
complete his tenth Angry Birds puzzle of the day. It can be very frustrating. Ideas will come to me when I least expect it,
so I am constantly writing things down and then leaving pieces of paper all
over the house. I just have to hope that
my mischievous three-year old will not find them and destroy them. (He is very big on destruction; it’s his
thing.) It is high time that I switched
over to a new method. I’m fairly certain
that there is a Dictaphone buried in my attic…
I am still not entirely sure how
I got here, but I am glad that I did. I
plan to write the third and final book in the French Twist series, French Fry, and then the sky is the
limit! I can only hope to continue to
peak your interest with my colorful stories.
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