Publishing Day

It was pretty exciting on Tuesday this week to finally publish my first novel. It’s been an embarrassingly long time coming. I wrote the first few chapters in 1999. When Dixie and I met, there were plenty of other things to occupy my time. I continued to play around with it for years, but it wasn’t until the first year I participated in NaNoWriMo that I really got serious about finishing it. Sadly, that was in 2007. I competed in the annual event for three more years, finally “winning” it in 2010 by writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Those 50,000 words would eventually become over 100,000 words.

I started setting aside a half hour every morning to write before I went to work. Some years were better than others in sticking to this regimen, but 2015 was a very good year, and my New Year Resolution for 2016 was to finish and publish. I’ve told several people that this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I have learned a lot from the experience and I am now committed to writing a sequel – that I hope and pray does not take me near as long as this one did. If you’d like to follow me in my struggles, please check out my author blog. (Oh, and buy my book, while you’re there!)