These Five Years: Introduction

My upcoming five-part series on life as an unexpected novelist.

The Idea

It recently dawned on me that it would soon be five years since I sat down to write my first novel. Five. Whole. Years. And because I love to mark a milestone, I’m inviting you to join me on a little trip down memory lane.

Beginning this Wednesday, November 1, and each Wednesday through the rest of the month, I’ll share a five-part series on how a writer of creative non-fiction who “could never write a novel” did (and is still doing) exactly that.

Wheat Field with Cypresses at the Haute Galline near Eygalieres, by Vincent van Gogh (1889) || Sketch and study with ink and paper.

Over the years, you may have been privy to small snippets of my writing life on social media, but nowhere else can you follow its winding path in words. We’ll take a journey from its beginnings, detail some of the missteps and victories along the way, and consider how the time it’s taken has informed my work at present.

“That’s a whole child,” Cliff said, when I told him the book was almost five.

It’s true: every two years and a couple of months, I’d been having babies while dreaming of writing books. Then two years and five months after my last baby, that dream became a reality. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

I ask myself why anyone should care about this series. I’m not writing from The After, after all: that pinnacle feat of being agented, wait no, getting a book deal, I mean, publishing a book. (The bar of what we consider “success” just gets raised, doesn’t it?)

Honestly? I’m writing these stories because I care. Perhaps more than I ever have before, I care about this novel and its place in the world. The persistence itself is the miracle, to me.

Do I want to achieve those things, in the end? Yes. (Like, so much yes.) But I finally understand that not having done so makes the work no less important.

Instead of from The After, I’ll share these stories from The Meanwhile.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Thank you for being here,

Read more from These Five Years series:

These Five Years: Part One

These Five Years: Part Two

These Five Years: Part Three

These Five Years: Part Four

These Five Years: Part Five