The Journey Begins...Again...

It has been way too many years since I last posted.  I retired in 2014 and have not really felt like posting anything until now.  I went back and read all my previous posts today.  It was then that I remembered that I used to have 2-3 blogs covering different aspects of my life.  Well, that got old so a number of years ago I restructured everything and lumped them all under "As the Chicken Clucks", the blog I had originally set up to cover the things related to my workplace.  It was around that same time, I think, that I changed the focus of my main blog to my needlework.  Like a lot of things in life, that fell by the wayside, too.  For some strange reason, it appears that the only blog that now appears correctly when I preview the post is this one.  Until I can figure out why "Chicken" isn't working right, I'll just have to lump everything under this one.

The last several years have not been particularly enjoyable. Hubby passed away in January of 2012.  I continued to work until the end of April 2014.  Let's just say that circumstances at work helped me make the decision to retire.  I was still in that quagmire called grief when I retired.  Not having to get up every morning and go to work and function, my insomnia became full blown during that time period.  I've suffered from insomnia a good portion of my life but it got really bad in 2014. Night after night, I'd try and go to sleep...with very little success.  One of those nights I became so angry that I grabbed my laptop and just started writing.

Probably twenty years ago I started a book about a woman that survived a plane crash and lost her memory.  At the time I was working full time and taking care of family responsibilities.  I only got a couple chapters into a book that I felt would be very therapeutic for me to write.  I stuck the pages into a desk drawer once life got in the way.  See that was back before I had a huge hard drive to save files to.  Long story short, those pages disappeared.  Maybe they got thrown out...I don't know.

Back to 2014...  I remembered the story and took the premise of the airplane crash and started writing.  (I saved the amnesia plot line for a subsequent book.)  Anyway, I started writing that night and the words flowed out of me like water.  I finished that first book in under a week.  I almost felt driven to write. Every waking moment I was pounding away on my keyboard.  Oh, my insomnia got better, by the way.  In writing that book, I worked through some of the grief symptoms and a number of things were put into perspective.

The first book is not my favorite.  It was a journey...one that came in just under 300 pages.  It was therapy with a plot.  I really liked the characters from that first book and realized I wasn't done with them...so I wrote a second book.  The second book takes place about three years down the road from the first one. The original characters are in it and a bunch of new characters were added to the cast.  I got more than a tad gabby in that book and it's over 600 pages. After I finished it, I realized I still wasn't done with the characters and wrote a third one.  It takes place a further three years after the second book.  More new characters were added to the ever-growing cast.  Then I got the bright idea to write a fourth book in the series.  That one takes place ten years after the third book.  Yeah, that one started out okay but didn't get very far before it stalled.  It has now been stalled for at least eighteen months.

I have this thing I do when I get stuck in my writing--I either start a new story or I open up one I've already got in the works. While I was working on the second and third books of my crash survivors, I had also been working on two others.  The first was the amnesiac.  That book got stuck at 112 pages in and sat that way for over six months.  Oh, I'd go back and pick at it and maybe get a sentence or two and then I'd get stuck again.  The other book that I was picking at during that same time period was about a woman that travels to her hometown to visit her sister and gets broadsided by a drunk driver on the way into town.  It hit quite a few snags, too.

I began to wonder if what writing I'd already done might not be all I'd be able to come up with.  After all, the amnesiac had been sitting out there for so long that I was almost to the point of just dumping the file.  I came really close to doing that, too.  I actually opened the file one day and decided to give it...one...more...try.  Imagine my surprise when it took off like a house afire!  It went from 112 pages to 369 pages.  Technically, I suppose it could have been two books but the stories dovetailed so nicely that I just left it together.  The first part of the book is about the amnesiac.  The remainder of the book is about a secondary character related to the amnesiac's story that morphs into a main character. Once the amnesiac's book was finished, the second book about the woman traveling to see her sister took off.  

I've read about writers that have plot outlines and backstories all laid out before they ever start writing the actual story. Unfortunately, I don't have the patience to do all that.  I'd rather be writing.  My approach is to start out with a basic premise and my hero and heroine.  I never know where a story is going until it gets there.  Sometimes where my stories wind up even surprises me.  That's what happened with the two books I just mentioned.  The amnesiac's book takes place in a small town in Nevada.  The second book takes place in Minnesota. There's a character in the second book that sells his business and starts to travel in a motorhome across the country visiting the National parks. Guess what! He shows up at the beginning of the third book pulling into the little Nevada town to eat breakfast at the diner.  No, it wasn't planned--it just happened.  He winds up staying in that little town, getting married and has a kid.

By the time I was a few pages into that third book, I knew I had something.  I wasn't sure what...but I knew it was something. The third book pulls the other two together.  I'm currently working on the thirteenth book in that series about the small town.

One of the things I love about writing is that I don't have to be bound by reality. Oh, to a certain extent, I do, of course.  I'm talking about not having to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt before putting it to paper.  After all, no one reads them but me.  In this latest book, I put this outlandish escape pod system into the backside of a high security lab in a manufacturing plant.  I mean I had intruders armed with assault weapons and C4 getting ready to breach the interior of the lab.  I had to have a way to get my hero and heroine out of the area safely. Come on! Give me a break!  They got safely away... They're traveling around the country in an RV right now.

I've got an idea where things are going now...sorta...  I've been giving my brain a bit of a rest to recharge while I re-read the previous books again.  Well, I read for a while and then I put my earphones in and listen to an audiobook while I knit for a while, then I go back to the reading.  Somewhere in that cycle I'll pull up the book I'm working on and add a bit to it before starting the cycle all over again.

I have a friend back East that says I absolutely need to publish the books.  I don't see that ever happening.  I think I've got too many hangups from my childhood.  I'm not a professional author--I'm just an old woman that started writing because I couldn't sleep.  My books bring me pleasure and escape.  I love my little town with all of its quirky inhabitants.  I wonder, sometimes, how long I'll be able to continue to add to the town before I run out of steam and have to fold my tent.  I've already got my next hero and heroine waiting in the wings  so I'm good for now, at least.

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Next time around, I should write about my cats...