Mindy Carlson

I’m a bit late on this, but lateness seems to be one of my main characteristics recently.

I am late for lunches out, late to appointments, late in getting my children to bed. I’m just late.

I am also late in my own personal deadlines for this book I’m working on.

I am writing a book. A fiction novel about a woman who loses her sense of who she is when her husband dies and has to go back to her hometown in order to finally find out who she was meant to be.

I meant to get my first draft done by December 31st. However it is now January 14th and I have at least a solid week of writing left to go.

I could have had it done by December 31st, but my own entire sense of self slid off the map and I was completely overwhelmed by what it would mean to finish this book. Because finishing the first draft is so not the end of writing a book. Even finishing the last draft is not the end. Nor does it end with finding and agent or getting the book really and actually published. And that is overwhelming because I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just a woman with a story that has been bouncing around in my head for a few years and I finally took the time to sit down and try and get it out.

And it has poured out of me. I have over 95,000 words right now and I’m still not done.

Oh, I know that there will be some major rewriting happening. And I know for sure that a whole section is going to be cut and buried in the boneyard. That is daunting, too.

People think that writing a book is a piece of cake. I know that as a reader I devour books in just days. Sometimes even as little as 1 day. So far this book as taken me 375 days to write. And I’m not done yet. I feel close to finishing my first draft – like I said, I think I can be done in a week, but then there are the second, third, and fourth drafts, too.

I hope one day you will be able to read this book in 2019. And then the others that come after this first effort. Because I have more stories that are begging to be told.