Getting Personal

Trisha made a great point about internet safety in her last post, so in response, I'm going to share the most personal experience I can think of.

Take that, common sense.

:)

When my husband and I were trying to conceive baby number three, I discovered failing at getting pregnant is the worst pain I've ever felt. It took us so much longer than I expected to get pregnant, and that expectation made failing at it every month much worse.

Trying to get pregnant took over my life. I counted the days religiously. I didn't take ibuprofen for months, just in case. I white-knuckle exercised, trying to lose weight before the baby came. Every month I had this hope that strangled me when I found out that yet another month had passed, and another hope had died.

The hope was crushing, and became too much to handle.

About that time, I received an email from Nanowrimo. Two years before I had tried Nano, and failed at 7,000 agonizingly slow words. I had a miserable time with it. The next year I tried again for 50,000 words, and barely wrote 3,000 words all month. 

I wasn't about to try and fail again. But I decided late that October,  I needed the escape that only comes from following around a spunky teenage girl and her love interest. I decided I would throw myself into the story, and take a much needed break from trying to get pregnant. 

I would write this story for me. I swore on the first page- breaking my own rules, I wrote make out scenes which still make me blush, and I put in illogical systems of magic. I didn't care. No one else would ever read it. This story was mine, and I wasn't sharing.

November first I wrote more than 11,000 words in six hours. There was something about Larissa's voice that felt familiar, and right. Some of my best writing yet, I've found, came out of Larissa's voice. I became obsessed with the love story. More than anything though, I found the escape I needed.

Cover made for fun through
myecovermaker.com 

I found out I was pregnant on page 230, but I couldn't let the story end. FTCM had become something bigger than a personal vacation. I believed in the story, in my writing, in my characters, and I felt I owed it to them to finish. Which I did on the third to last day of November. 

FTCM, to this day, was my favorite writing experience. I would leave my desk with my heartbeat racing, and my fingers twitching, ready to get back to the keyboard. It gave me so much joy, so much freedom, so much escape. 

But most of all, it gave me my little boy.

Second drafts, querying agents, maybe even self-publishing if all that doesn't work out, is the effort I'm trying to put in to give that story it's due. I'm trying to pay it back, and pay it forward, for anyone else who needs an escape.

And that's why I write.

~Sheena

What I'm reading now, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

What I'm writing now, Hatched (Second Revision) Chapter Ten.