This blog post is coming six days after my official conferral date for my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I can’t believe I’m typing that right now. I did it. I finished my thesis, turned it in, and I am finished with college for the rest of my life!
It’s crazy to think that I wrote a book over this last year. I’ve had three surgeries during this time, and things have been a complete mess full of surgical complications, infections, and kidney stones. At one point after a surgery in late spring, I had a hole the size of a silver dollar open around a surgical site after my stitches ripped open. Sitting at my computer proved to be a great challenge with an open abdominal wound, and as soon as I healed from that, I developed a severe anti-biotic resistant kidney infection.
Writing has so many challenges on its own, but when you add disabling medical conditions to the mix, it can feel like finishing a book is so completely out of reach that it’s laughable.
But even with everything that has happened, I did it. I wrote an entire book with a word count of 92,094 words upon submission.
Wrapping up my last term of graduate school was pretty intense. Did I turn in my thesis? Yes. Did I have to take an incomplete to finish things because of that persistent kidney infection? Yes. Is it the story I plan to publish as is? Absolutely not.
My original goal was to send this book out to beta readers in November. That obviously didn’t happen. Letting go of that goal hurt a lot. I was committed to making it, but my body said hell no, and I had to listen to it. And right now, I’m eternally grateful that I did.
Having such big and continuous setbacks made me look at my writing and re-evaluate my story and the characters. I also had someone outside of the program read the first twenty-three chapters of my book to see if they saw the same issues that I did (Hi Paul!), and when I got the feedback I expected, it rejuvenated my writing process.
For the first time in a year and a half, I had the pleasure of writing for myself. Not for the instructor, the peer review, or the rubric. I got to write just for me. And this changed everything.
I fell into the What Lies Beyond the Veil trap; Everything started out strong, and then I lost the fantasy plot and subplots to the romance part of the story. So my goals have refocused on building the epic fantasy portion of the book. I am working on adding twelve additional chapters outside of Erissa and Rhazien’s point of view. The subplots are being woven into the character arcs and motivations more, and some pretty cool stuff is happening with the magic system. And I think this change in how the magic functions will create something unique to my story.
So far, in the last three weeks, there were 15k words in revision, and I have added an additional 10k new words. I am beyond excited to really bring this story to life. Who knew what I needed was to graduate and not feel that pressure anymore for my writing to really take off!
Right now, there are no firm goals for completing this novel. I am focusing on making this into a story that I will be proud to share with the world, and that’s going to take however long it takes. Hopefully, it will be sooner rather than later, but I’m going or quality, not quantity. I don’t want to fall into the trap that most fantasy romances fall into when I do my book reviews on this website.
Here’s to the next chapter–literally. I can’t wait to share Erissa’s story with the world. Thank you all for hanging in there with me as I make this story everything that I dream of it being.