I was in my mid-twenties when I started writing The Omen and the Legend, the first book in The Weldling series. I was in my late forties when I finished. So, quite literally, I’ve spent half my life writing this story, living in this world, getting to know these characters. Sometimes people ask me how I managed to stick with this story for so very, very long, especially since so many of my other projects have fallen by the wayside over the years. First of all, let’s dispel any delusions that I was busily pecking away at my keyboard every day. The Omen and the Legend did not require twenty-five years of diligent and dedicated work nor did it receive such. But, I think I can best answer this question if you’ll entertain a quick analogy. I think it’s like running into a friend you haven’t seen in a while and they’ve lost fifty pounds. Naturally, you’re awestruck by their success. And you ask them, “Oh my God, however did you achieve such an impossible goal?” (Because I need to lose weight too and surely there must be some secret you can share.) And you can usually count on them answering in some predictably disappointing manner. Oh, they might mention a program you’ve probably heard of or cabbage soup which you’ve probably already tried. But at the end of it, did we really need to ask them how they did it? Didn’t we already know that the answer would boil down to this: they eat better and they move more. There is no secret sauce or magic pill. So, in the same vein of thinking, just how did I manage to stick with this project for a quarter of a century? I think we all know the answer to this one too: one word at a time. But I’m not going to allow myself the luxury of oversimplifying this because writing a book is anything but a simple process. Since this blog topic was proposed to me, I’ve done some reflecting on this question and looked back over my journey, in the hopes of identifying stumbling blocks and improving my pace in the future. Because I have two more books to write in this series and I’m gonna have to step it up if I hope to finish before I die. All that being said, there are a few points I’d like to expound upon if you deign to listen.
I’m a slow thinker. I like to tumble ideas around in my head for awhile. I’m just not good with rush jobs. So, I thought about this for a couple weeks and just let that question simmer in my subconscious for a while before I pulled it out and examined it. Almost immediately, I was able to identify four things that slowed down my writing.
The first and most obvious thing that ate up my time as well as a lot of my creative energy was: life. At least for the first five years of my book-writing project, I was a single mother of two of the most adorable fucking assholes you’d ever care to meet. I was a full-time nurse with a mortgage and mounting Nintendo bills. During these years, I wrote when I could but it wasn’t as much as I would have liked. It was a hobby I engaged in when I wasn’t pissing away my time playing Crash Bandicoot.
About eight years in to my book-writing project, I started a business with my mother. And for the next seven years we owned a doll and toy shop and, even though my writing was, largely, on the back burner during those years, I wouldn’t trade those years for the world. At the end of those seven years, I lost my mother, so I consider that time to be the best spent in my life.
But the biggest thing that slowed me down happened about fifteen years in to my book-writing project—shortly after my mother died, I got sick. I was diagnosed with a neurological condition called Pseudotumor Cerebri or as I like to describe it—all the fun of a brain tumor without an actual tumor. I couldn’t work as a nurse, I couldn’t drive, I could barely walk. All my words got jumbled up. The vocabulary that I had built over the years was, at times, reduced to the level of a first grade primer. This was a huge stumbling block. I mean, what can you write…without words? Some of you savvy readers might be wondering just how I got my words back…I’ll get to that momentarily.
Now the fourth thing that slowed me down was the story itself. Yes, you heard me right, the story itself slowed me down. Sometimes the details would overwhelm me. Or I’d just see pieces of the story but not understand the context of those pieces right off or not understand where or how those pieces fit in the whole. The Weldling is a complicated story especially once I realized that the world I was revealing was much bigger than this single book could contain. When I realized that this story was actually a series of three books, it became even more complex because I had to be certain I was laying the groundwork correctly in the first installment. Sometimes it boggled my mind and I had to step back for a while. Now, I don’t for one minute believe that I created this story. Instead, I revealed it. And the story did not reveal itself to me at any breakneck speed, let me tell you! It was like having a slab of rock and I had to chisel away at the slab and remove everything that wasn’t the story. Sometimes I was slow for fear of removing too much and losing the story. Other times, I would find pretty rocks that belonged somewhere else and attempted to glue them to my slab. The story that I started twenty-five years ago was vastly different from the one I just finished. First off, did you know that in the beginning, Judah’s name was Grant Houston and he was a private investigator? Yeah, Judah still ribs me about that one! One of the things that took so long was that I had to stop and listen to the story that Judah and the gang were telling me and stop ‘gluing pretty rocks on’. But even though the story was a slow-reveal, I knew early on that there was something pretty cool buried in that slab. At least, I think it’s pretty cool.
So, those were the things that slowed down my writing. Some of those things were slackness on my part and some were unavoidable stumbling blocks. And now, I can take a real-time assessment and determine if those issues are still relevant and, largely, they are not. My kids are grown and no longer require grilled cheese sandwiches around the clock. I no longer own a business. I lost a lot of weight which improved my health and neurological issues tremendously. I’m also much better at listening to my characters. But back to the original question: what motivated me to keep coming back to it? Well, sometimes Judah would issue a sharp whistle to get my attention or Jonathan would make some good-natured wisecrack. Pallas might be standing with her arms crossed, tapping her foot impatiently, silently glaring at me. I kept coming back because they never let me drift too far away. But getting down to brass tacks, why did I ultimately finish this story? Because I believed in the story. Or perhaps, more precisely, because the story believed in me.