Today is the day...

Today marks the day I finished the first draft of Calm before the Storm Evan's Sins.

To most people it's another Friday but to me it's special. I reached a new pinnacle in my career as a writer. The Ruthless Storm Trilogy was born from Volume 1 Eye of the Storm Eilida's Tragedy. I wrote it for fun. When I got to the end I felt hollow inside and followed my instinct, giving birth to a trilogy. 

What makes this piece of work special to me is difficult to put into words. With Baby Girl Cleo lives inside me. There are untold sections of her story that one day I may publish. Whether I do or not is beside the point. She lives and breathes inside me. Her life flashes through my head. If or when I write more Baby Girl books they are already there. 

Calm before the Storm was a challenge. A different kind of challenge. For starters the entire book is written in third person. Second I started with a blank slate. The story didn't tarry away in my mind before writing. My prompt, the many clues my mind slipped into Eilida's Tragedy and the epilogue - its crucial to Evan's Sins. I had an ending of sorts and a beginning but had no clue as to the cast of characters and events that would follow. Each page I typed led to another bone, another chapter. 

My mind pieced the book together out of order. When I wrote the ending today I smiled out of satisfaction. And not because, Oh my gosh the first draft is done! I smiled out of pure ingenuity, a more than clever ending that I never saw coming. There is a host of characters encompassing over a thirty year time period and my mind made all the characters and their experiences come to one single point.

All my novels end with surprises that are somewhat anticlimactic - that's me. At the same time they leave the reader pondering. In Calm before the Storm Evan's Sins the message is clear, don't let strangers into your life. At the same time strangers are my characters best friends. Maybe a better moral would be don't trust strangers. But some strangers in the book are good. I guess there is no moral. 

Anyhow it is a major accomplishment that has left my brain spinning in the dust. And the hamster brain in my mind is turning. I'm not ready for volume 3 but when I start who knows where it will end!