once upon a time. in a land far away.

I’ve spent the past twelve months trying to figure out who I am as a writer. This, on the back of a 78,000-word bit of book that’s sat in my desk from then ’til now because I’m just not sure if it fits.

I started out at the end of a chic lit binge and my writing mirrored it. If I’m being truthful, and I try to be, I’d say this is me. Because I am woman, amongst other things, and relationships and streams of thought and the odd ‘does my bum look big in this’ make sense to me. In many ways ‘supermodel’ is the most real thing I’ve written here. Not just because I lived it. Breathed it. Gained and lost thirty pounds because of it. But because that’s just the way I talk. When I’m on the phone with my sister, sounding shocked and annoyed and pitching my voice up and down. I’m all about ‘Sure, she has a lot of teeth, but so does my horse!’.

But I didn’t do me. I didn’t do ‘write what you know’. I did that other thing. And here’s what I discovered. It’s fine to write what you don’t know. But you better make it believable. And I wasn’t doing that.

Cosmo Buffy didn’t fit Toler Mountain. West Virginia Buffy did. So I went back to my roots. To the mountains. To that person I never really was, but maybe would have been, if I had come along 50 years earlier. ‘Course I did it in a library in the middle of England. But I did it. I dove into the classics. I re-read Faulkner and Twain. Lee and Williams. Wondered if Hemingway knew what he was on about when he said “…you cannot do something someone else has done…” and decided to ask my Pa.

That’s when I stopped reading (southern stuff) and started listening. I found that life I might have had in my grandfather. And I found my voice.

I used it in ‘potholes full of shine’, ‘the death watch’ and just about every other piece of fiction I’ve written for this blog. Oh, and for that little matter of 78,000 words.

It doesn’t exactly belong to me. The tone or the rhythm. But it does belong to him. And I know him as good as I know anything.

I set myself a deadline when I started this blog. One year in. That year ends this month. Three more weeks of rewrites. Three more weeks of edits. Then it’s time for the querying. Time for the fingers crossed. Time for I-can’t-wait.