New Beginnings
It’s nearly the first of the year and the perfect time for new beginnings, but if you’re like me, the wintertime often brings an unwelcome writing slump. With the past year being a rolling coaster of exciting news (a short story published in a new publication, readying a manuscript for submission, a few full manuscript requests), I also wrote myself into an incendiary burnout by year’s end.
In early November, right after the loss of my grandfather who was the rock on the maternal side of our family, the dream I thought might be just within my reach began to drift away. Two of the agents who’d requested the full manuscript reached back out to tell me they were passing on representing me and the book. At the same time these rejections came in, I hit a wall with my podcast. After producing weekly episodes for more than a year, I decided to take a break around Thanksgiving. I wanted to spend more time with my family, focus on content planning for the podcast, and work up a new batch of agent queries.
A writing acquaintance of mine (and regular contributor to WOW! Women on Writing), author Kelly Sgroi, created a fun initiative called “Write Till Christmas,” designed to encourage writers to work on their projects in the months surrounding NaNoWriMo when we’re all so busy with the holidays and other obligations. I asked WOW’s executive editor, Angela Mackintosh, if she wanted to partner with me on an “outline swap” by Dec. 25. We’d both had ideas for novels we’d been toying with, and we figured if we became accountability partners we might actually make progress!
Pushing aside guilt over pausing the podcast, I began plotting. And thinking. And fleshing out characters and scenarios. I had a new idea for a novel that was a departure from true crime and the thriller novel I’d just written, and it focused more on a protagonist my age (the delightful perimenopause years!) who enters a time loop and gets to reconnect with her younger self. It’s not a mystery, but more a story about the importance of female empathy and friendship. And nostalgia!
At first, Angela and I decided to swap our work in three different parts—Act 1, Act 2, and the final scenes. Once I had gotten through Act 1, I completed Act 2 and the Finale in one sitting in mid-December, ahead of our deadline! She did the same, and we were both thrilled to have fleshed out so much of our story ideas when they’d been rolling around inside our heads for so long. Not only that, but a few days before I completed my outline, I was inspired to sit down and sketch out three or four new podcast episode ideas and secured two interviews for the first quarter of next year. The vault to new ideas, which I’d been repressing, had been unlocked.
I can’t wait to get started on this new project!