One month ago today I clicked a button that said publish and my childhood dream of becoming an author became a reality. Honestly it was pretty anticlimactic. I decided to self-publish because I didn't think it was right that a stranger dressed in khakis, working in some office got to decide whether my book could make their boss enough money to be worth printing. But, as it turns out, even self –publishing has its rules, and i had to wait two days while the powers that be at decided whether my book was good enough to grace the pages of their website. Thankfully I passed their scrutiny but it was the longest 2 days of my life.
And then I got a text from my sister that said, “It’s up!” and sure enough an email alert pinged on my phone, it said: Your paperback “The Lesser Remain” has been published! and I yelled and showed my husband and my boys and they yelled too. I’d done it. I’d written a book and let it out into the world.
My dream had been to write a book, but I had never imagined that book being about zombies or someone like me (with cerebral palsy) let alone a book about someone like me and zombies. The first book I ever wrote was a cheesy romance novel when I was in high school. The second was a NaNoWriMo story I can’t even remember. The Lesser Remain was the third, and my first to see the light of day.
This story came as a result of a writing exercise that was just about getting me writing again. Sam was four and starting preschool and I found myself facing a long day with nothing to do. So I sat down and I wrote I pretended it was NaNoWriMo even though it was March and I wrote 1667 words that day, intending to finish a first draft in 30 days. At the end of the first day, I sent a text to my best friend and said “I think I'm writing a story about people with disabilities surviving a zombie apocalypse”. His response was, “Now that's something I've got to read”. So I sent him the pages.
Honestly, if I hadn't done that, the novel might have died on that first day, but he sent me an e-mail back late that night that said, “Oh my God, I have to know what happens next, please send me the next chapter." I didn't have a next chapter, but I promptly wrote one and then another and then another and when I got to the end 50,000 words later, my friend told me it was the best thing he'd read in a long time.
I didn't believe him, not for one second. He was my best friend. surely he was just trying to be kind or at best was biased. So I sent it to my sister next. She thought it was good too. I knew she was likely biased as well, but the girl reads nearly as much as I do and she and I have a strict no bullshit policy. I began to revise. It was hard, I struggled more than once with writer's block and feeling as though what I was writing was absolute trash. What was a 42 year old, doing writing a story about zombies, I thought. But I persevered.
In the end became more than a zombie story. It became a story about facing the fear that you're not good enough. Good enough to survive, good enough to love and have someone love you back, good enough to take care of others, good enough to be the person that other people depend on, and what can happen if you finally start to believe it.
Is this the best book you'll ever read? Probably not. Is it perfect? Definitely not. But I put my fear and self doubt aside and put it out there. So far no one has claimed it is the worst thing they have ever read, and for me, that is good enough.
xoxo
Melissa
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