Let’s start at the very beginning.
Legend has it, it’s a very good place to start.
I’m not sure what it says about me, as I begin this, my inaugural blog post, that
It took me three tries to spell “inaugural,” and
All that’s running through my head is Amy Adams as Julie Powell wide-eyed insisting to her movie husband, “I could write a blog. I have thoughts.”
So, here we are. A place for some thoughts.
Right now, it’s a bizarrely frigid day in Dallas as the country hunkers down to ride out a winter storm. I’m on my second mug of coffee and have a space heater aimed directly at my hands. I’ve got an epic orchestral mix of the Frozen soundtrack on in the background because my YouTube recommendations are the absolute best and it seemed appropriate for the day.
A little more about me. I’m Rachael, and as of today, my authorship status is ‘aspiring.’ I turned 30 in December of 2020, and I made the decision that 2021 would be the year I published my first novel. Exciting, right?
My credentials? I have none! None officially, anyway. I’m a full time graphic designer, so as of right now, writing is something I squeeze into my schedule whenever I can. Same goes for reading. When I was a kid, I was absolutely the sort to dutifully pretend to go to bed, and then pull out a book and read by nightlight light for another hour. I no longer have that kind of stamina, unfortunately, and am the proud owner of a full shelf of books that I own and have not read yet. But, and this is something I think you learn as you get older, there’s time. In the grand scheme of things, there’s lots of time.
I really started writing creatively in college. Fleshing out my own ideas, that is. I met Mikey and Susan in my introductory Japanese class my junior year and we formed a small group, meeting after class at the student center Starbucks to type away at our respective projects.
Cue a time skip. I moved to Washington DC to attend grad school, and while I gained a ton of other things, I lost writing. At the time, it felt like something I had tried, and now it was time to move on to other hobbies, other interests, maybe something with a bit more gratification built in.
Fast forward to 2017. By some stroke of luck, I found myself in that beautiful creative space where the ideas just seem to flow, and before I knew it, I was writing and sharing my work with a friend on a regular basis, and it brought back really good feelings.
That’s how my current project began. In just a few months, I had three books worth of dialogue written. And then they took a long nap amongst my files.
Fast forward again! To 2020! I was now living in Texas, entering Month 4 of Quarantine, and starting to lose my mind, as I think most of us were during that time. I found myself reading through those initial scripts I had written and feeling so at home with the characters and remembering all the things I’d loved about the stories when I was working on them, and I wondered, “Could I turn these into actual novels? Could I really do it?”
And that was the question that changed everything.
I’ll get more into said project in another post and elaborate more about the steps I’ve taken and things I’ve learned along the way. Honestly, it might have been easier to start this adventure after Book 1 (Codename: TCTT) has been released? But I like working ahead.
And that’s about it! I’m sure I’ll find all kinds of things to do with this space, so if you’re up for following along with me as I figure all this out or simply stopping by every so often, you are most welcome.
