Sara, Where Are You?
“Sometimes you have to lose all you have to find out who you truly are.”
Roy T. Bennet, The Light in the Heart~ excerpt from Success Is The Best Revenge
Sara Matthews, the main character of my debut novel, Success Is The Best Revenge (SIBR), seems to have gone into hiding. Every morning I come into my office with a hot cup of coffee, sit down and warm up the laptop. Before I even read emails, I open up Scrivener (a program I use for my writing) and spend several minutes staring at the blank white screen, cursor blinking. My brain flits from one thought to another to figure out what Sara is up to in this chapter. Then I get bored and change my screen to my email, then Facebook, then Instagram….and before I know it, the writing day is shot, and I have accomplished nothing.
Sara has disappeared and doesn’t come to whisper her story in my ear anymore. When I wrote SIBR, Sara was always with me, making my fingers fly on the keyboard as I tried to keep up with her voice in my head. Even my editor-in-chief, Toby, seems confused about where she might have gotten off to. He spends more time sleeping in his cat bed than ever before.
Patience was never mine, so have I just been sitting here waiting for her to show up?
Heck no!
I’m fleshing out the following:
New characters for Sara to interact with.
New places for Sara to explore.
New job in a whole new environment for her to be part of.
And a new culture - one that is so different from Whidbey Island.
And because writing a novel is not for the faint of heart nor the learned, I continue to learn all I can about the craft of writing.
And because I am on my own marketing SIBR, I have done a lot of learning about how to advertise. Now, this task is not a fun one for an introvert. My comfort level is to stay at home, in my pajamas, having coffee at the ready, writing, NOT going to book signings, book clubs, and Zoom talks. But, sadly, if I want readers for my writing, I need to put my big writer’s panties on and, like Nike says, Just Do It.
Well, friends and readers, I can’t sit here any longer. Time for a walk to clear my head, so Sara may be invited to come back and help me continue her story.
Kathy and Toby
Oh, wait! What do you think about the picture of Sara? Does it look like the Sara you had in your mind when you read SIBR? Let me know what you think in the comments.
