1st draft nearly complete!

I love butterflies.

They are my favourite species, for their beauty and diversity but also their transformation. I find it surprising and a wonderful reminder of what we are like on this journey through life. I also think it is the same for creativity. It needs time go from a thought or a picture to a sort of recognisable shape, until finally it becomes the beautiful creature we had always imagined.

I have spent a slow and long time writing my story, over eight years in fact and its only now that I am beginning to see the beauty in it, even though it’s still far away.

First drafts are always rubbish and I am actually looking forward to the editing stage, where can cocoon myself in my little world, a place where at the moment exists only in my head, my computer and some notebooks.

The hardest thing for me is to continue writing even with the nauseating fear that I am not actually any good. To keep pushing through the insecurity that my story isn’t worth telling and to keep the vision I have for it directly in view, even when I feel like giving up about seven times a day.

Even still, I keep going. Adding one more word, sentence, paragraph and chapter. It is all at once a painful and exhilarating process. It is thrilling to commit to the page those characters you are looking directly in the eye and only you can see them.

Ideally, I would have been done about six years ago,  but the course of life has helped to enrich my work and slow it down at the same time. But I am actually kind of glad that it has taken me as  long as it has. I can trace my life through it, when a particular character comes in or when a turning point in the plot pushed the story forward or I have had to change direction completely has been fed into this little story of mine.

I think I have said it before, but my dream is to be published. Not necessarily successfully (who am I kidding! I want to make at least SOME money) but I have always wanted to hold a book in my hands that had my name on it. A story that only I could have written in my own peculiar way…

I am still long way a way but I am getting closer all the time to accomplishing a dream I have had ever since I was a little girl and even if the world doesn’t get to read my little story I have done what comes naturally to me, as a writer.

So, I would like to encourage other writers who are in the same stage as me, or those who are simply writing and all the creatives out there, I feel your pain and keep going!!

oh and by the way….HAPPY NEW YEAR!!