Writerly Beginnings

My first manuscript (MS) is the beginning of what I think will be a trilogy (edit: now it's a series of FIVE), and is still saved as "Book One" on my computer. I've had the basic concept of Book One since 2011.

That previous fall, Christina Perri released her song "A Thousand Years" before the film The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 came out with it on the soundtrack. When I first heard this song, I had the fleeting thought: "it would really suck to wait that long for your true love."

Good ol' Valentine's Day came along a couple months later. I was in college, attending a lecture on Platonic love (as in Plato, not "hey, we're platonic, not romantic") when the professor quoted The Symposium:

"... and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment..."

My brain, being the weird thing it is, combined these two experiences and thus, Book One was conceived.

Truthfully, at this point it was really just Book, because I had no desire to tackle the task of writing a trilogy. Hell, I obviously wasn't ready to dedicate myself to just one at the time. It marinated for three years before I ever sat down to work on it. Even when I did, I hardly thought I could put forth the time it takes to complete a novel. I had just gotten married and my husband and I found out we were going to be parents (!!!!!!!), so I wouldn't find the time for the next 18+ years.

But, of course, I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo 2014, and fell hilariously short on the word count. I did, however, create the story arc and discovered that one book wouldn't be enough to delve into these characters and their history to make it worthwhile. So I wrote outlines for four novels, but eventually combined the middle two and settled on writing a trilogy. (Which is hilarious to me now, because it's so meant to be five, not three.)

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