Image credit via thebookrefinery.com
It's been almost 10 years since I started writing my book. A novel. That sounds like a long time, but it didn't really take me 10 years. I just started that long ago. I have finally typed the words The End....for the final time, after 3 edits, none professional and I'm scared. What now? I miss them all already. All the people I have grown to know and love in the story. What'll I do without their unfolding lives in my life.
When I started writing this book, I was in a great place in my life. After years of renting itinerantly and jumping from one casual job to another, I had finally hit a comfortable plateau. I'd been living in the same unit for three years and had been working in a secure and stable workplace for a year. I was saving money and had just come back from traveling through Europe - albeit a Contiki at the age of 31, but it was bloody awesome. I was healthy and I was happy with myself. My landlord wanted to sell the unit and offered it to me to purchase for $250,000. Can you imagine? A two bedroom unit in Marrickville, in the inner city of Sydney for a quarter of a mil, in 2006. I didn't have that kind of money. I didn't even have a deposit and the bank wouldn't loan me anything without one. I was doing ok, but I was not going to be able to afford it, I was happily living fortnight to fortnight.
When he told me that if the new owners weren't investors, that I would have to move on, I didn't panic like all the other times I'd been evicted. He said he would put in a good word for me, but it didn't matter. I had another option.
My brother was share housing in a great ground floor apartment in Surry Hills, only a few suburbs away. It was an incredible place with two bathrooms, a courtyard and a complex gym and pool. His flatmates had finally moved on and he asked me to move in with him. The rent was reasonable and we were both excited to have the opportunity to live with family again.
The weekend before I moved out of my unit I met my now husband. By the time I got to my brother's place I was finally at the end of a very rocky and tumultuous few years. Great job, great apartment, great flatmate, great boyfriend. It was time to start the book.
And so I did. I sat down at my laptop one day, a shitty old one I bought on ebay and just started. The main character started off loosely based on me. Lives with her brother, works in a government department, socially awkward. Other people who had walked in and out of my life over the years emerged as other characters. I was so unclear about where the story was going, but I made some rudimentary plans and just figured it out as I went along. It took on a life of its own.
A year later, I hadn't gotten very far. I was too busy loving my life. My brother bought his own place and I moved to the northern beaches of Sydney to be closer to my partner. Soon the book was on the backburner. Something I picked up every now and then and then put down again when life got busy.
My partner and I went overseas together. When we got back we bought our first home. We got married. A year later I was pregnant and then 10 months after the first baby, I conceived twins. Suffice to say, I've been a little busy.
But this book, this dream, this thing I always returned to when I wanted to feel completely and utterly satisfied and immersed in my own thoughts, this story filled with people that were so much a part of me whose lives were unfolding almost separately to me, it was just there. Like an old mate that I caught up with when the time came. That was enriched with the progress and changes happening in my own life.
The moment I was away from the obligations of full time work, from the time I went on maternity leave, I vowed to myself that I was going to spend more time on my writing. To finally finish it. And since the twins moved out of their newborn phase and I found myself with a more predictable and more forgiving schedule, I've slowly nutted away at it and now it's done.
It's no secret that doing two Gunnas Masterclasses and the Gunnas Self Publishing were huge influences on my motivation and momentum to get this book finished. I could finally see it as a real possibility. That I wouldn't have to worry about trying to sell it to a publisher and prepare for the inevitable knock backs. I could publish myself. I could do it myself. I could do it for myself. Who cares if no one buys it or reads it. I wrote it.
As the story took shape and the characters evolved, I not only saw the end of the book, I can now see the second and third books and I guarantee, they won't take me 10 years to complete. Although life is still pretty busy and I'm sure will only get busier. But so what. I'll make the time.
So the next step now is to work on getting it out there and start the other two. Stay tuned.
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