My journey begins

As with every story, there is a starting point . . .

And so it is with a blog.

Wow.

My first post. That easy.

I thought it would take months before I could have a website up and running to start blogging. But it turned out to be a breeze to do it myself! Even if I had paid someone to build my site, I would still have had to come up with content, which is really what takes time.

How did my writing journey begin?

I should probably mention that my first language is French. I learned English after we moved to Alberta where, starting in junior high, I went to school completely in English. I was also an avid reader and that helped me tremendously to learn this second language. But if someone would have told me at the end of grade 12 that I would one day be writing novels, in English, I would have laughed.

I probably have a very thin folder of scraps of paragraphs, single sentences, and ideas from when I was in school. But one memory does stick out from junior high. At a career fair, a presenter asked this question:

If there were no televisions, how many of you would write?

It must have been the first conscious thought I had ever had of wanting to be a writer. I was an avid reader, sure, I had as much imagination as those authors I read, but me, a writer? Where had that idea come from? Did I know then that I was setting my compass on a path that would eventually bring me to this point, even if it took over ten years before I actually took that first step?

My second clue should have been the high grade I got on my grade 12 English departmental exam, after my teacher told me I would fail. Needless to say, I went into that exam more nervous than I had ever been for any exam before (which is saying a lot for a high achiever). I mean, every program in university depended on a good grade in English. If I failed, I was doomed. But I as sat down to write the exam, I decided to just write from the heart for the written parts.

It worked! I got one of the highest grades in my class. Yes, this French girl who hated to write essays, who had been told she would fail the most important exam to get into university, didn’t just pass by the skin of her teeth, she got over 90%! That was higher than some of my classmates who loved English.

I was floored. And so was my teacher when I picked up my last assignments. I showed her! All that work to learn English since moving to Alberta, it had paid off huge!

Even given those two clues, writing never really entered my mind

Into university I went, getting first my bachelor in computing science then, after another two years, a bachelor of education to teach junior and high school math and science. Sadly, before I finished my education degree, my dad passed away. I finished my degree and taught for a year.

Teaching wasn’t for me.

The fall after my year of teaching, I ended up with time on my hands, wondering what to do. I was doing temp work which didn't feed the need of my brain cells to be of some use. And even for this TV loving gal, well, TV just wasn’t cutting it.

Then on September 10, 1996, I got inspired enough with an idea to sit down and start writing.

Sure, I had imagined stories in my childhood (it was the only way I ever got to sleep except the year I taught) but I had never really been inclined to write those stories down. I don’t think I ever finished one in my head. No idea had ever inspired me before to truly put pencil (I hate pens) to paper (well, really, keyboard to screen by then).

At the time, I was still grieving losing my father. Writing seemed to help me deal with some of that loss. I started with a police romance novel which had a very prominent father theme.

At the end of fall of that year, I moved out east when I was offered a temporary job that put me in a better position to get into IT and make that first degree pay off a little. That temporary job opened the door into the IT field I’ve been working in since 1998.

Back to writing. For that first novel, I wasn’t tracking my writing as I do now. I dabbled on and off on that police romance novel and finished . . . drum roll . . . 7 years later.

Yeah. Right. Me, a writer? Not if I take seven years to write each novel.

In the end, what matters is that I was on the path. I was gaining life experience in the meantime and that helps feed the imagination and put life in stories.

Writing was more a hobby but I practiced my creativity regularly by role-playing with a group of online friends. I’d work on my stories on and off. I subscribed to an online newsletter about writing. I was a moderator in a forum about writing. I attended conventions. I talked about writing to online friends, many who also wanted to be writers.

That time wasn’t wasted. And in finishing that first novel, I learned a lot.

And then I was hit with inspiration again in 2006. A new idea but this time, in the fantasy genre. A scene really. But to write the story around that scene, I needed to write what came before and so I began what is now Resurgence (it went through many changes in title).

I knew I could finish a story, I had done it before. So I finished the first draft in 6 months. From 7 years to 6 months to finish a novel? Wow! Maybe I can do this.

I actually submitted it to five agents.

I got rejected by all five.

I expected that. I had read enough blogs and articles about publishing that I wasn’t too disappointed. I kept the day job.

Did it stop me? Of course not. I went on to finish the rough draft of the sequel six months later, the book I had been inspired to write in the first place. Even with a full-time job, I was on a roll! There’s not much better for a writer than that feeling of knowing you can finish a novel. So I continued with the next one but stopped about 65 Word pages into it about two months later.

Life got in the way. By then it was 2007.

It took seven years before I truly picked up my fantasy series again during a stressful period in my day job that required an escape. Painting the house didn’t occupy my mind enough to keep me from thinking about work.

I had never stopped thinking about my series. Once in a while, I would open up a story or notes to reread, or jot a few things down. I was ready to be serious about it again, especially if making a living out of writing could take me out of that stressful day job.

I was on that writing path for good

I picked up book 3 in the summer of 2014 and finished it in early January 2015. My pace wasn’t slower than before, I was just writing longer stories as well as fixing story issues I had never addressed. I continued with book 4 which I was planning on finishing in June but ended up finishing in October 2016. I had hit my target number of words in June, it’s just that the story that wanted to be told wasn’t finished.

I was no longer writing to quit my day job

It became fun. I found my passion.

Now that I had 4 books in my Auros world under my belt, it was time. I knew enough about the world that I could finally let the first story go out and accept being “stuck” with the details in it.

I first worked on polishing book 2 thinking I might publish Resurgence as a prequel eventually. I changed my mind and decided to publish Resurgence first. Despite working on publishing that first book and the others, I still found time to finish book 5 in April 2017 and started book 6 right after that.

Since 2014, I can truly say I am a writer by night. I am not yet a published author but that will change when Resurgence is published.

There's only one path I want to be on now, the one where I get to write.