"That's...—wow, really? Fantasy? Wha...? When did you do this? No, I'm not laughing at you, I'm just surprised… So what's your book about?"
"Oh, well," I begin, squirming. "It's about a girl, er, a young woman, she um. It's got enchantment—no witchy stuff, I drew a map, er um," I say, cringing, apologizing and making the moment so awkward awkward people jump in to help me...
Wait! Don't give up on me! I've been practicing. Ok, here we go:
"Yeah, I did write a book." I begin. "I needed a project during a really rough time. I just really wanted to go somewhere where I controlled the outcome." A deep breath. I plant my feet and square my shoulders.
"My book is about a young woman coming of age. It's a princess in the cool castle kind of story with all the fairytale elements that are really fun. Anyhow, she's on a mission to save the world and doesn't want to do it. So yeah, I wrote about a tortuous trip through a fantasy world with a Happily Ever After ending."
No, it's not long enough to be an epic fantasy, but long enough for my princess to complete her task. I had an idea—from a dream actually, and I had written it down in a notebook about 10 years ago. Then last summer I took it from my notebook to the computer and I couldn't stop writing."
"80 thousand words later, a book was born. But 52% of them are adverbs, I'm sure." I realize too late I'm just getting warmed up. My audience is thinning or beginning to yawn, but I can't stop.
"My intentions went from writing the book just for me, but for someone (I do have a few readers in mind) and I intent to fill in a gap with wholesome, fluff free books." I back away, I said my peace. I let them go with that. Said with conviction and from the heart.
Now it's me on my mission: To write the books I want to read. Clean fun for my kids, my kids' friends (and all my friends for that matter) who ever might have enough patience to suffer through all 80 thousand of my words.
And I'm just getting started.
And it's now November: National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo