My novel is a bird.

Yep, you heard me correct. A bird.

My novel has taken flight and is out in the world. Never before has anyone ever read any of it. Well, that isn’t true entirely. My fiction writing professor in college read the first two chapters but now that it has a different beginning, she technically has only read the second and that was years ago. Much has changed since then.

I finished my first round of editing tonight and offered to share my work with any of my friends who would brutally critique it. So now, my precious little baby bird has found its wings and has flown from my computer as a word document to two of my friend’s computers as a pretty little PDF file.

Lord, help me.

I do not like to share something this close to me to my friends for I fear that once they read it they will either A, hate it or B, realize how messed up I really am. Because, as you may have gathered from earlier posts, I am drawing from quite a few personal experiences in this novel and feel rather tangled up in Stella’s character. She and I think similarly. We lost similarly  I can’t pretend like that doesn’t mean a lot to me. While I am definitely not the same person as she is, I understand her. I understand what motivated her to do the things she did and feel the way she felt. I felt many of those same things but I never acted the same way. But I thought about it.

She is like my child, my first child. I molded her and now I have kicked her out of the nest to see if she is ready to fly and if she isn’t, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. I always imagined this day would come but I never realized how terrifying it would be. My work is in someone else’s hands to dissect and destroy if they so choose. It’s unnerving, maddening.

Pray for me.

(Onward?)

Current word count: 78,668!