#NaNoWriMo fever has reached me! I couldn’t help but feel the heady excitement of all the hopes and dreams of the writers I follow on Twitter. It made me feel that I should allow for some hoping and dreaming too.
So here I am, resurrecting a short story that I won a competition with when I was in school. It still amazes me that I wrote it. It’s more thoughtful and poignant than I would believe my 16-year-old self actually was.
It was sentimentality that made me come back to it really. I only owned a hard copy of it which I had kept saved in my ‘personal file’ – a huge physical folder dedicated to all my achievements. 16 year old me didn’t have access to a computer or the internet, but my father did have a typewriter in his office, and he had his secretary type this out for me. Almost 20 years later, I decided to type it out and save it on the cloud (that’s how much I treasured it). And since I wanted an opinion on how it should be fleshed out, or rather improved, I shared it with my critique group.
There was a common consensus that it would work better as a chapter book. Lately, I’ve been dying to write a longer book. For kids though, but not quite a chapter book. Thanks to the recent popularity of contemporary MG novels such as Poet X and Other words for home on Twitter by the Americans I follow, I discovered that there was an audience for something I could do! I love writing free verse poetry, and I find the high word count of regular novels too intimidating (pointed look at my kids aged 5 and 2). This feels like something that I can do right now, something that suits the season I’m in. So here I am, writing my first MG novel in verse!
It may not ever see the light of day, but I’m excited. And I’m hopeful.
3 thoughts on “‘Announcing’ my goal”