In the Beginning

In the Beginning

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

— Toni Morrison

It started with a simple question. But how will it end? 

Six. I think. Yes. I started with six partially finished manuscripts in varying draft lengths. At least one I started when I was in college. Some are handwritten. Some are a combination of handwritten and partially converted to digital; a few are one hundred percent in digital format. If I’m being honest, there may be more than six, if ideas count–titles on a list to be developed into manuscripts. That could stretch my list into double digits. At what point can you call a manuscript a manuscript? The modern dictionary definition says it's “an author's text that has not been published.” Okay, I’ll take that, raise it by one to bring it to seven.

Now I have seven manuscripts in the works because I asked myself a question one day. Could I write a novel in ninety days? At first, I thought about challenging myself to do it in thirty days, but I have a full-time job. When I did the calculations, total word count for an entire book, then divided that by the number of days, and finally factored in how many words I had to write in a day–the answer was absolutely not. So, I decided on ninety days. I’d give myself ninety days to write a book. Challenge accepted. Great.

That was about six years ago. Fast forward to today, it feels like a failure, but in reality, it’s far from it. I could have picked up where I left off on one of the six partially finished works about twenty chapters in, but I didn’t. I had an idea about a new story and ran with it. I’ll save the details for another post, but the net-net is that I did finish a rough draft of my manuscript, not in ninety days but close to it. It took four months, but I wrote it. Six years ago, I completed my first manuscript–from start to finish. What came next surprised even me. I made some simple edits to my newly completed manuscript; then walked away.

That was in the beginning.