THE PROCESS
That's how long it took to write 168,804 words of my live book that was called His Substitute Wife... My Sister.
Now how would I know that?
Every quarter I try to write a book. I make it live for my readers to see the entire process. Not just any book, mind you. I make it a romance suspense or murder mystery, but it has to have a twist.
The hard part about this is that, I have no idea what the twist is until I get into the story.
This was one of my largest novels yet. The other live novels I have done were:
- Mistaken Identity (erotic intrigue) - deceit leads to sweet delight
- Tanner's Devil (romance I/R intrigue) - a woman's journey to the other side of love
- Sin's Iniquity (romance suspense) - Do you fight the feeling when you know it's wrong?
- Secrets Lies & Family Ties (romance I/R suspense) - Perfect Opportunities lead to wicked affairs
- Sex Weed (romance suspense) - one taste of her and he couldn't get enough ... to bad it's his brother's wife!
- Diary of A...(erotic intrigue) - one woman's journey to fine
- Teach me to love (romance intrigue) - when they come together whose teaching whom?
Now mind you I have no idea what the story is going to be about. I just have a couple of scenes and two very interesting characters in my head that I have to weave and wrap a story around with lots of plot and lots of sex. LOL.
I can do both very well but writing it live is like running a race until it ends.
I finished it this weekend and my brain literally hurts.
I know there are no pain receptors up here and no I'm not talking about my skull, I'm talking about my brain. The muscle between my ears is sore. Like it was the one running and not my fingers that had to type all that out.
I'd say this one was my most challenging book because I gave the main character a phobia so awful, I had to rip hair out to figure it out - hence wig wearing will be mandatory for the next couple of months.
From this whole experience, which I've been doing for the past two years and a half years (Yes, I've written 8 full length novels of over 100,000 words in that time), I've developed a workshop, which I plan to pitch to local libraries in their writing series.
Wish me luck and I hope to generate sales of my newest novel along with putting together a handy reference novel for people who would like to increase their word count.
I was at my writing meeting and a mother of three who was new came to the meeting and said for the past seven years she's been working on her romance novel and she spoke about how hard it was to come up with character motivation and story plot. I found that hard to believe, but then I guess I'm so into my own word of writing that I make the mistake and think all writers are like me. We can just come up with it with a click of our fingers.
People ask me a lot how do I do it and I really can't give them an answer. Maybe because I've been doing it for so long that it comes to me so easy and when I have a story to tell I can just sit down and put it on paper like I was writing out the 50 states over and over again off the top of my head.
I see my stories in real time. It's as if I can reach out and touch my characters and sometimes I can feel, hear and see the world or chaos I've created in my head as real life, all the while I'm driving, washing dishes or catching the bus.
To be in my head is like watching a never ending movie and it becomes such a distraction, I have to leave the television on at night so I won't wake up and type some more.
When I was at the end of the road in my marriage, my ex taken away a lot of things in order to control me. He treated me no better than tissue on the bottom on his shoe and I still stayed with him despite my friends telling me to leave. Then one day this man decides to tell me I have to give up writing. For just a few seconds of my life, I thought about doing this to make keep my marriage together. And when I say it was the longest seconds of my life, I do mean that because my body felt the devastation in that moment of never being able to write again.
And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. If he had not asked me to give that up I think to this day I would have still been in that unhappy relationship - miserable on the outside, but happy on the inside because I had my writing.
I often think of Beethoven and his passion for music. Even when he lost his hearing, he would still write and most people say he wrote his best piece of all when he had become completely deaf. I visualize him lying on the floor with his fingers moving on the keys to feel the vibration, his head pressed hard against the top to feel the beats and bass pouring his heart and soul into every stroke of his finger.
And I understand his motivation. When I create something, I feel like God on the Seventh day and I want to share it with everyone just as He did. To know my imagination has brought just one person something is a feeling worth the struggle, pain and heartache it caused during its creation process.
Okay, going to take something for the migraine and enjoy this seventh day feeling with a cold bottle of water and a pillow.
Keep writing.
Your Author.
Detroit Native, Sylvia Hubbard, is the single mother of three and a part time independent published novelist. She teaches workshops on Internet Marketing and Publishing and is the founder of Motown Writers Network, one of Michigan's largest literary organizations for writers, readers, authors & poets.
All books mentioned can be purchased at: http://lulu.com/SylviaHubbard
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Nyota