A Little Bit About Me

I've always been a storyteller. Even as a teenager, I'd make up stories to tell myself as I was falling asleep. I was never very good at writing them down, though. If I started writing one of my stories, I'd mentally finish it and move on to the next story before I had more than the first chapter written down. (Part of my problem has always been the desire to re-write a scene until it is perfect. I'd never get around to writing the rest of the story. Now I force myself to write the complete story down before editing it.)

When I was in high school, I saw an ad for a mail-in course on writing children's literature. It was with the Institute of Children's Literature. I somehow (and I'm still not sure how) convinced my parents to let me take this course. The Institute wrote back saying they normally didn't take students as young as I was, but that my writing was good enough that they'd decided to accept me. I took the course and learned a lot from it. However, my teacher didn't really like my fantasy stories. She saw that I was very good at writing educational stuff and encouraged me in that direction.

I turned in my last assignment--a fantasy story!--right before heading off for college. It was returned with a "you can do better than this--try again!" note. Well, I probably could, but I was too busy with school work and settling in at college. Nearly two years later, in 1996, I finally decided that it would be a shame not to finish the course. I wrote another fantasy story. Back came a letter saying, "I never thought to hear from you again after so much time!" along with some notes on my story and a graduation certificate.

At that point, I started to ponder how I could combine my college major--equine science--with writing. I decided to create a CD-ROM on horse care for my Honor's Thesis. I sat in on a graduate-level course on authoring CD-ROMs and created my first CD-ROM on how to select, buy, and care for a horse. My equine science teacher knew about this and asked me to do my internship with her. Some of my fellow students had troubles learning the various horse gaits (e.g. walk, trot, canter, gallop, foxtrot, rack, slow gait), and my teacher wanted me to write a CD-ROM teaching this information. My "Horse Movement and Gaits" CD-ROM is now used by many universities, horse clubs, and individuals all over the world. After I graduated, I refined that CD-ROM and went on to produce CD-ROMs on "A Guide to Horse Nutrition" and "Horse Conformation & Athletic Movement."

About a year ago, I decided to write fantasy stories again. Looking back, I can see that my Children's Literature teacher was right about the problems with those stories. I can also see how far I've come in my skill as a writer. One bonus in writing educational CD-ROMs is that it taught me how to clearly convey information in as few words as possible. That is a very important skill for any writer.

Writing fantasy is very different from writing educational CD-ROMs, but I love it!

The Big Day

Back on October 21, 2006, I was watching a movie that inspired the question, "What would happen if a queen had to join a rebellion against her own government to regain her power?" I immediately had a scene pop into my mind of what would start the whole situation. I started writing that night. By November 17, had the first draft of the story done at about 60,000 words. I knew that I needed about 80,000 to 100,000 for a saleable novel, so I was worried by that. Still, this was only the first draft. I purposely hadn't done any revising during first draft because I tend to get myself bogged down if I do.

I went over the story to polish things up and add description ("show, don't tell" that I hadn't taken time to put in the first draft). I also made sure that everything was consistent. I then had four readers look my whole manuscript over. I also had numerous critiques of the first few chapters by a number of aspiring writers. In the end, I did five main revisions of the manuscript. The final draft of the manuscript was finished by May 13, 2007 and now has a 82,800 word count.

My query letter is now written and revised, so now it's time to see how the publishing industry likes my novel!