Warning, I'm taking a moment to reflect on my past year-and-a-half.
A year-and-a-half ago I was 20 and a junior in college. Up until that point in life I wrote all the time on the side for fun. Nothing ever real serious, just online and little stories here and there I never finished. Then the movie trailer for Inception came out and I got an idea to write a novel based on dreams.
So I sat down and got to 5,000 words where I hit writers block (something I was all to used to at this point in my life) and decided to just "sit on it." Fast forward a week and an idea pops into my head (Playground King) and I tell my girlfriend about it who encourages me to write it.
So I sit down and I start writing, and 6 months later I finished the 90,000 word novel. The feeling the moment I wrote that last word is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. It's something all of you know, something I don't think a writer can really express. The joy of actually finishing it, seeing the damn thing complete.
I then queried around and got 3 rejections where I came here and learned what I did wrong with my query. While I was mulling over fixing my Playground King query another idea popped in my head. So while I was working on my query I started another story.
Fast forward 6 months and I completed my second novel, this one much shorter thankfully, at 53,000 words. I go through the same process, this time I get a few requests and I send them out and here I sit waiting on them.
In that time of waiting I started three novels, two of which are sitting at 10,000 words and the other which I just finished today at a grand total of 35,000 words. In the span of about a year and a half I have written just under 200,000 words (before edits of course, since I cut a good 20,000 words from Playground King).
Stephen King has a famous quote (well, famous might be an overstatement, I should state it is a quote that sticks with me) in which he said "the first million words were just practice."
I look back at the last year-and-a-half and at the amount of words I have not only written, but deleted, tweaked, thrown out, thrown back in, and more, and I feel that while his quote holds true (as it is staggering the change in one's writing from novel to novel) I feel in my experience the words hold this to me: "the first million was fun, the next million was a dream come true."
It's amazing when talking to people before I graduated from college (I was a journalism major) and how many of them wanted to write a novel. It was my last semester of my senior year when I finished my first draft of Playground King, and word spread around in some of my classes. Some asked about my book, which I was more than happy to talk about, but many asked for the advice, or the most common one:
"How'd you do it?"
"I wrote," I would jokingly remark.
They'd laugh, get the gist of my answer and ask me other stuff like what I was going to do next. Why do I bring this up? I don't know, but I hope it means something. Because as I look back at myself from barely under two years ago, I never though I'd finish a novel in two years, let alone three novels in under that time frame.
If anything this has taught just how much I truly love writing. How much of a passion it is. As I wrote the last word to my most recent novel, I didn't feel relieved, like I had finally finished this gauntlet. The first thing that popped into my mind was this other story I've been thinking about and how excited I am to start it.
My girlfriend and her father always joke with me saying how I have to actually try to sell a book instead of keep writing. But I think there is something special in that. To be able to love something so much that you'd do it for free in your pass time, I think that is something many people would love to have.
Obviously, I want to make a career out of this so I can continue doing this. But I wrote all of this because writing is something special to me as I know it is to all of you. If anything I want to share this bounce with every writer here that understands how crazy we are to chizzle away at our words everyday just because we love to do it.
So this bounce is for everyone here, and I hope to have many more with all of you.