...It's about a girl who loses her brother and how she overcomes her sadness and herself.

Oh, my friends.  My wonderful and patient friends.  I have written so many drafts of this post.

A lot of you know that I have been doing my best to write a book for the last three years (actually, just two months shy).  This all started when, surprising even myself, I committed to NaNoWriMo in November 2012 during my last semester of college and pounded out 51,000+ words in thirty days.  It was a rush.  It was incredible.  I went in without a plot, without a plan, and threw myself in wholeheartedly just for the fun of it, and emerged at the other end with the beginning of a book.

Of course, once the rush of NaNoWriMo is over, it's difficult to stay on that high and ride it out to a successful end.  I did keep working, on and off, but I struggled to work consistently.  I wrote in bursts, reworked a lot of stuff, removed a lot of my original 51k, drowned in discouragement, floated in jubilation at the joy of writing, and floundered a lot in uncertainty.  I wrote an entirely new beginning, wrote the beginning of an end, came back to the middle, filled it in, and just kept going.  In August 2014, I finally wrote the last paragraph of a fully complete draft and was able to officially say I had a beginning, middle, and end-- and everything in between-- in the correct order-- as it should be.

Then the true editing started.  I just finished a fifth full edit and will be happily handing it over to my wonderful best friend, who works in the editing biz.  While I know she's not a fiction editor, and can't move my book along the lines or accept it at the publishing house where she works, I'm thrilled to have someone look at it with a professional eye and help me keep my dream afloat.

I always feel like I owe an apology to everyone, because while everyone KNOWS that this novel is a thing, a dream and goal of mine, I don't talk about it.  I don't like to talk about it.  It's this entire world that exists in my head; I and I alone live there, and I don't know how to communicate it to everyone outside of it.  My wonderful and patient friends ask me about it, they want to know how it's going, they want to know if they can read it, they want to encourage me, and I am always at a loss for words because I am so, so alone in this.  Everyone is around me; I am surrounded by love and support, and yet I can't feel anything but alone.  I don't even know how to communicate what I'm writing about because there is this terrible fear of not being taken seriously, of being just another one of those crazies who thinks they'll get published.

But someone has to get published.  I mean, look at a bookstore.  They're filled with the proof of people who got published.  Someone has to do it, so why not me?

I have been writing my whole life, though I have only been working on this particular project for three years.  And I will not quit.  If this isn't it, I'll try again.  I'll write another one.  I'll write as much as I can.  I'll send the manuscript out as many times as I need to.  I know that what I have right now, if it were to be accepted, may not be what actually gets published-- it could turn into an entirely new story by the time it gets through professional editing.  I don't know.  But I will not give up.

So thank you to everyone who has inquired about it.  To everyone who has seen my editing selfies and liked the pictures.  To everyone who has assured me they will read it when it's out.  I'm sorry I'm not better at talking about it.  I'm always so afraid of sounding self-involved and self-indulgent.  It's such an immense thing to say you're doing.  In my head, it sounds pretentious, pompous.  Before I even say it (and I avoid saying it as much as possible), I smell the judgment of others.

I will get there, as soon as I stop being afraid of myself.

Thank you all, my wonderful and patient friends.  Please know that I am grateful for it all.