Draft Zero to Writing Hero Chapter V:...now what?

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"]

Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with Chapter I.

Chapter V:...now what?

Shelving my YA fantasy left me in a weird funk. I'd been working on it for four years, and for the most part, I'd forgotten what life was like outside of revisions and querying. Fortunately, at the time, I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind. My partner and I were in the process of moving abroad to Belgium, which meant applying for visas, finding a place to stay, looking for jobs, deciding what to bring with us...it was a long and arduous process that querying had prepared me well for.

[GIF: "I've trained for this."]

Once I got settled in, though, I didn't know what to do with myself. NaNoWriMo was a few months away, and I had participated for the past few years - but this year, I didn't know what I was going to write. I tried my hand at thirty-minute flash fiction for a while in the hopes that one of them would spark some magic plot idea, but no dice. Slowly, they became more of a chore than the fun exercise I'd envisioned. When short stories didn't pan out, I got back into journaling, but it's just...not my thing. Especially not when every entry just says "I watched Netflix and played video games today." I went back to an idea I'd fiddled around with for a while during my querying days, trying to flesh it out enough to be able to write it in full for NaNoWriMo, but I couldn't find a way to make it work.

Meanwhile, I was trying to land a proper job in Belgium. I figured, well, I've always wanted to write professionally, so I decided to try my hand at becoming a game writer. I was very mildly successful - I wrote a small adventure for a popular video game that was available on Steam for a while, and crafted a couple campaigns for Trail of Cthulhu. But when my grandmother passed away in the middle of a writing test for a video game company, I couldn't do it anymore. All of the uncertainty of living abroad, the loneliness, the knowledge that not only had I failed with my YA fantasy but I didn't even know where my writing career was going...it crashed down on me. My grandmother had been the one to encourage me to pursue my writing dreams. I couldn't bring myself to write while I was mourning her, and I certainly couldn't write what the company was asking for. I lost my chance at the job. It didn't feel right to continue writing when all I could think about was losing my grandmother.

[GIF: Girl leaning against wall melts with text "Can't"]

Not everything sucked, though. I joined the team at Operation Awesome, where I still write slice-of-life posts about being a writer. I wasn't working, other than the occasional translation job, so I had plenty of time to be a CP for other writing friends. And even though the short stories hadn't really gone anywhere, when I went back to writing them every now and then, I realized that I was getting better.

In the past, I've had a lot of trouble with story structure. As a teenager, when I wasn't sure where the plot was going, I'd just kill a character and see where that took me. (Adult me does not recommend this strategy.) Writing short stories forced me to get better at planning ahead since I was working with a time limit. They also helped me learn to be more concise. If you recall, my YA fantasy was a whopping 170,000 words when I began querying, although I did get it down to about 75,000 by the time I quit. My short stories were getting sharper, leaner, more dramatic, the plot narrowing in like a Lois Duncan novel.

And as I chatted with friends back home, lying to them about how much fun I was having and how productive I was being, a passing comment by a friend gave me an idea. Something started to take shape. NaNoWriMo was barely a month off, but maybe I had an idea for a new manuscript to write - a YA contemporary, something totally different from the fantasy manuscripts I'd exclusively written in the past. And I had just enough time to start prepping.

[GIF: Man scratching his chin with scrolling text "Hmmm"]

Continued in Chapter VI...