Well, I finally wrote/revised for three and a half hours yesterday, fueled by copious amounts of coffee. I didn't accomplish that much word-wise -- maybe 1500 words at most. But I think I'm getting closer with Gaia's Hands. Lots of work to go, though.
Gaia's Hands is my first novel. It's always been a problem child of a story. When I wrote it, I had no intention of writing a novel. I had written a short story based on a dream I had about an encounter between myself and a younger man. (If you think the dream had to do with the fact I was approaching my 50th birthday, you'd be right. And the dream was far more bizarre than anything I wrote from it.)
I wanted to know more about the dream, so I started doing a Gestalt dream analysis method where one tells the story from the viewpoint of the different characters, and even the important inanimate objects of the story. (I didn't go that far). During this set of writing exercises, a story developed. And then another.
After the third story that developed from the dream, my husband Richard looked at me and said, "You've got all these stories. Why don't you write a novel?"
I had never written a novel before because I think in terms of short stories -- small plots with big twists, big themes. Novels have big twisty plots, and I wasn't sure I knew how to plot those. I wrote Gaia's Hands anyhow. Its original name was Magic and Realism, and it was heavy in theme and extremely light in plot. It was basically a love story, and although I have nothing against love stories, the characters did little more than hang out together.
And then I wrote more novels, some of which collapsed into each other (For example, Magic and Realism became Gaia's Hands, and then it subsumed another novel during the same time period called Gaia's Eyes and that's the novel I'm currently re-editing) and somehow I got better at writing big twisty plots.
It's been a lot of hard work editing and re-editing, and then getting help editing from a developmental editor and re-editing, but I've learned my goal has shifted from getting published to getting good, then getting published. I don't want to grow to regret anything I've published.
I guess now I can call myself not only a writer, but an author, because I have devoted myself to growth. And it literally, cliche notwithstanding, started with a dream.
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