My Experience with Vomiting | Writing My Book | Faith

Hello lovely people of the Internet. Yes you read that title correctly, today I'm going to be talking about my experience with vomiting---my first draft of my book. For the longest time I've been avoiding calling my story a book but 90,000 words later I've finally come to the conclusion that it's okay to call it a book. Before I get into the vomit that is my first draft, I'll give you a little backstory.

In the beginning of my "writing journey" I didn't really realize that, that was the path I was going to go on. It's interesting to look back now because there were seeds planted that have no grown into well--me? Anyway, I had this notebook that I brought with me where I would write all the stories I had come up with. This guy Ryan asked me "oh do you like writing?" and I immediately replied with a straight "no," which is hilarious to look back on now because look at me now! I had also written a Harry Potter script which was roughly 20 pages long---at the time that was a lot for me and yes I was very impressed with myself. So those were the first seeds that was planted, it wasn't until middle school did I blossom and by blossom I mean discover that I enjoyed writing.

There was this weekly writing project that we had to do in my English class, and one day an old friend of mine showed her story where she would submit sections or chapters every week making one whole story. I decided to copy her and I came up with my own story. What was that story about you may ask? A pop star. Yeah... That's not my proudest piece of work. Anyway, I discovered that I really loved writing this story and I would always be itching to write the next chapter/section. Now looking back it's hard to believe how my English teacher thought my story was good---and maybe the story was which I highly doubt. The entire format was out of place, grammar and punctuation was terrible and I used an excessive amount of exclamation points and question marks. So what made my teacher praise me for my work? I. HAVE. NO. IDEA. However, I will always be grateful to Ms. Cooper because without her I wouldn't be where I am today---in my writing journey I mean. You see, middle school wasn't the best for me and besides a few friends, discovering my love and passion for writing was one of the best things.

Onto grade 8, so for some reason my homeroom teacher/social studies/English teacher began to talk about books and how they require a lot of imagery and description etc. For some reason, this set me off with the need to write a book. Um---that was five years ago and after give years I can say that I've finished writing the first draft of my back originally titled, The Last Witch but then realized that made no sense to the story, then it became my protagonists name Sabrina and it remained that for five years until I remembered that I wanted it to be a series. Through a lot of thought I came up with the final (hopefully) title Mortal Hearts & Shadows which is the first book in a series.

Now let's talk about my experience with the vomit. I've always been told how emotionally tolling it is to write a book and I never believed them until I wrote my first draft. It was like I was on my period 24/7. One minute I'd be ecstatic over writing and the next I would be wanting to throw my computer against a wall which luckily I didn't do. Putting my thoughts on paper---my story on paper was so difficult because I had to write it knowing it wasn't perfect, and knowing that there were some real bad parts in it but I had to ignore it because you know---I had to keep vomiting the story out.

During this process I began distracting myself with a lot of things like creating spotify playlists for my book because "I would benefit from it in the future" which I sort of did, I also made A LOT of Pinterest boards for "inspiration" but really it was because it looked pretty and I was PROCASINATING. Why the procrastination? The answer to that is that I didn't want to go back into my first draft because it was so frustrating having it unfinished. There were also moments where I wanted to skip ahead and write parts I was excited for not the boring parts.

Vomiting was so annoying if I'm going to be honest. This is gonna sound so stupid and odd but it hurts knowing you have to write it, a lot of you may not understand what this means but it makes sense to me in my head.

Although writing the first draft was so incredibly difficult and took a very long time for me to write, it was so rewarding in the end to sit back and be like "I did that."

So that was my experience with vomit, what was yours like?