Blog? Schmog! I've Got Three Books Under My Belt!

Somewhere in the depths of my Blogger archive, there are 520 posts. Blogger counts unpublished drafts toward your total though, so I've probably got an even 500 knocking about.

Five hundred. Most of which were probably on the flip side of 500 words. Assuming (at a very large stretch, granted) that they were all that figure, that's 250,000 words. A quick burst of research on Google just now tells me 80,000 words is a reasonable length for a novel which means Lizzie's Home thus far pretty much equates to three whole books.

No wonder Talented Hubby questions the amount of time I blog, LOL.

When I was a young 'un, my future profession of choice was always 'author'. Being that I was a solitary child and read most of my early years away, that word was revered. Like 'amusement park designer' or 'resident chocolate factory taste-tester'. The bookstore was my Heaven; the local librarian, my pastor.

In high school, my voracious reading habits earned me a fast track into the advanced English courses and nothing would thrill me more than getting a CM on my assignments (confused? CM stood for 'completed, to a model standard'....the equivalent of an A+). I went a semester and three weeks straight getting nothing but CMs one year. The drought broke with a CS+ (completed, to a standard level - plus a wee bit extra). I was devastated and asked to resubmit. That's how hardcore I was.

It worked.

And I got a CM on my second try, LOL.

Don't worry, it didn't last. The twin evils of Physics and Chemistry soon put a kybosh on my eagerness to get to school each day and I finished my schooling with a solid, average record. But I never lost my passion for the written word.

Things got a little crazy right out of high school. There was a year or so of unfocused study which almost saw me heading toward a career in community services (ahem, my lecturer once told me my final childcare study was 'the best she'd ever marked' - the rain soon came down on my idealised version of motherhood when I had my own kids!)

Long story short, I met Talented Hubby and we soon found ourselves pregnant with Jay (and yes, there was a gap in between dating and procreating!) Even longer story short, Boof and Moo came fast on his heels (thankfully, not at the same time). At just-past-22 years of age I was the mother of three kids 3 years and under. TH was about to take a leap of faith, career-wise, and we were riding the wave of an autism diagnosis.

You could say day-to-day survival mode was our default setting.

Not much writing went on for quite some time. I tried to pick up study again and failed dismally (the particular course I tried to restart required a phone-in lesson for an hour, once per week per subject, of which I had three. With a special-needs preschooler, a toddler and a newborn, it just wasn't going to work. No child on earth, let alone three of them at the same time, naps to that schedule!) And then one day I discovered a well-respected writing course run out of my city was asking for applicants. There was a selection process, portfolio submissions (my piece was about autism, no big surprise), entry placements, the works, but after jumping through all sorts of educational and personal hoops, I got in.

That course - or The Years Of Which We Do Not Speak, LOL - was four years long, part-time of course, and done through external study.

For the first year, I rode high on my plumped-up feeling of self-worth as a writer. Look at me! I'm a Writing Student! Hand me that tweed jacket!

During the second year, I mostly enjoyed my work, but spent much of my free time obsessing over due dates and the various bits of research that needed to go into each assignment. I also discovered one of my lecturers was out to get me and I lived in constant fear of The Letter of Doom, otherwise known as a 'please resubmit' notice (for the record, I managed the entire four years with only ONE of those, woot!).

In the third year, my mother died and things just seemed a little....pointless. I went downhill fast, but scraped through. Most lecturers were extremely accommodating but I'd be lying if I said I gave every assignment the attention it deserved. Nine times out of ten, I wrote just barely what I had to, and nothing more. I still passed admirably (my high school English Studies teacher, Mrs Robertson, sat ghost-like in the background the entire time, tsk-tsking and muttering words to the affect of '"Oh Liz, if only you used your ENTIRE brain for that one!", LOL. I'm sorry Mrs R, really!) I seriously contemplated early-exit (with a lesser qualification), like every second week. Kind of like when you just pay that $50 get-out-of-jail fine instead of wasting time trying to roll a double first.

The fourth year was TORTURE. I thought of nothing other than The End. My last ever assignment was, appropriately, a portfolio of pieces geared toward our experiences with autism and special needs. Started with autism, ended with it. Despite an absolute task-master for a lecturer on that one, I finished the course as a whole with a solid B+ standing and a really good bit of paper saying I had survived and knew how to string a sentence together. I was thrilled.

And then I slept for a week.

That was fifteen months ago and I haven't done a thing - officially, that is - with my writing since. It's not like I haven't thought about it - I gave myself those first few post-course months off on purpose, to decompress from All The Big Words. Sesame Street, with all its forced ABCs, never looked as good as it did during the Autumn (that's Spring for you Northern Hemispherans!) of 2008. But it was always my intention to 'get back into it' and start submitting pieces, now that I was a Proper Qualified Professional Writer and all.

Where did Lizzie's Home fit into the timeline? Disillusioned with my fourth/final year, in March of 2007 I discovered blogging was a convenient way to avoid looming assignment deadlines and ta-da! Here we are!

I haven't wasted the last two years though - TH, are you taking notes? - my post count shows I've written three whole books' worth!