I haven't forgotten my book!

I just haven't posted here in awhile. *ashamed*

I finished the first draft of my novel and also did one preliminary revision to it. Now I need to go through and really tear it apart. I have a few people reading it to give feedback and am thinking of joining a critique group. I also changed the title to Lineage. It's a relief to finish it but it's also daunting to think of the edits that are before me.

I also entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Award and was just cut today in the first round. Ah well. I wasn't expecting much since I found out about the contest with only days to enter and wrote the pitch quickly.

I've also started on book two of the series. It's set mainly in modern-day and 1830s-1840s Ireland. Yup, I have my work cut out for me. ;) And I've already come up with basic ideas for more books in the series.

I'm hoping to finish revisions of book 1 by the summer and then I will decide if I want to try to get it published or go the self-publishing route. I'm excited and nervous about it all!

The Beginning

All stories have a beginning, obviously. This is mine.

I started seriously writing my first novel a few days ago. It was a Friday night, and I suddenly decided I should stop waiting for the right time and just do it. Friday the 21st of January, 2011 to be exact. A story started coming to me and I started writing bits and pieces. I wouldn't say I started at the actual beginning of the novel, but it is close to it. I only got a whopping three pages typed, but I started! Woohoo!

I decided that the story was going to have a part that was set in the past, along with the part I was writing in present-day. I narrowed it down to Ireland in the early 1800's. The story will follow an Irish couple immigrating to the US right before the big potato famine in Ireland. Of course this means I have just opened up a HUGE can of worms. I'm the kind of person that will only do something right. If I do it, it will be done well. So, now I have a ton of research to do. I've been poring over old travel books from the 1800's to get a feel of what Ireland was like then. I'm also writing bits and pieces of the story in present-day while researching. Today, I'm up to six pages. Hey, I doubled what I had! And It's fairly impressive if you note that both my husband and I are quite sick and somehow still taking care of our three young children.

So, you're probably wondering what the novel is about. So am I. ;) All joking aside, I have a great many ideas floating through my head right now and I'm not quite sure which ones will win out. I also don't want to give everything away. I won't be posting the whole novel here, nor will I be posting key plot twists and how they resolved. I may eventually publish this, so I don't want to give it all away. But as of right now, I can tell you probability is very high that there will be a bit of a supernatural twist (basically energy healing and psychic abilities). There also will be the parts set in the past in Ireland/America like I mentioned. I don't foresee time travel right now, but am not totally ruling it out. My guess is it will be more like flashbacks or "visions." You can't have a story in Ireland without folklore and legends, so there will be a bit of that as well. There will be some romance, but I haven't even touched that yet. There is also a whole lot of mystery. The whole book will be about a young woman discovering who - and what - she is.

That's my ideas for now. We'll see what develops!

I *may* post a short excerpt of what I have written so far. I'm still debating. It's still SO new that I'm quite nervous about it and don't know if I can take bad criticism yet. We'll see. ;)