The Road So Far

That's for all you Supernatural fans out there.

Or how about my favorite series.

(Queue Avatar Roku)

The story of how I got to this point, on the cusp of signing a literary agent for my debut novel, is a 10-year adventure I've told in parts many times.

I figured it was high time to get the whole saga out while I still remember it and still have the receipts, as they say.

This won't be every single, nitty, gritty detail. For those, it'll have to be face-to-face.

2015 - The Idea

As my son is fond of saying, "You wrote a novel out of spite?" Well, yeah. Sort of. There was a certain, extremely popular, series of books that my wife and her friends got into. (And no. The year matches but it wasn't 'Hunger Games.') After hearing so much about it, I started reading them as well. Then there were movies, and it turned into a whole big thing. I remember leaving the theater after the last movie thinking, "Surely I can do better than this?" That got the ol' brain working on a main character that I actually liked. A few years passed and I started jotting down story ideas but really had no knowledge on how to write or even how to start. The thing I knew for sure was her name was going to be Anne. Why? If I had a second daughter, that was going to be her name. But 3 boys and 1 girl so, I had to use it somewhere, lol. There's a little more to it but I'll hold that one back.

Early 2016 - The Start

The catalyst for most great endeavors starts with an inciting incident, and this one was no different. In this case, it was a power outage and a trip to the library. It was a freak storm, so, caught off guard, we were sitting around in the dark on this fateful Saturday. Louisiana gets hot, so my wife Chantelle decided we should take a trip and after driving around for a bit, we decided to hang out at the library until power was restored. It's weird being at the library with no agenda. I've always gone with a book or video in mind or for an event but that night, I just sat around with nothing to do but enjoy the air conditioning. While the family explored the kid's sections, I wandered upstairs to the library proper.

Daytime, but you get the idea.

I never do this, but I went to the information desk and asked the librarian, "Can you recommend a book on writing?" I wish I could remember her name, because she lit up immediately and beckoned I follow her saying, "I know just the one." She led me to the non-fiction section and handed me Barnaby Conrad's "The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction."

I checked it out and devoured it. I hate reading textbooks or non-fiction but something about the way this one was written, I breezed right through taking notes the whole time. It was published in 1990, so you can imagine how dated the last chapter on publishing is. But the writing chapters, exquisite for a beginner. After finishing, I banged out the first 5 chapters of my novel in a week. Now, I'm not gonna pretend they were masterpieces of literature. (Passive voice anyone?) But it gave me the confidence and basic info I needed. I can honestly say, without this book, I never would've started.

August 2016 - The Flood

In a person's life, there are many milestone moments. If we're just talking Baton Rouge flooding, there have been many over the years. 2008, 2001, 1993 and the big one simply known as '83. But nothing could've prepared us for the Great Flood of 2016. A '1000-year flood'. For 6 days, what I've heard called a non-tropical cyclonic event spun overhead and dumped over 20 inches of water on the city of Baton Rouge. I could only find 3-days' worth of radar, but you get the idea.

The rains stopped but we had to wait for the waters to recede. If there was one bright, shining star from this event, it was the birth of the Cajun Navy. It was a wild sight, seeing folks pull up and launch boats from spots that normally held daytime traffic, but the amount of people rescued by the community was awesome. Was I part of the Cajun Navy? Sort of. I like to call it the Cajun Marines. I was in waist deep water quite a bit, but didn't own a boat. lol

It might be hard to visualize what it means when I tell people we had 9' of water. Well, here ya go. Right up to the fascia boards. So, standing on the flat ground, I could've raised my hand as high as possible and there was still another foot of water to go. Now imagine that covering an area of several square miles.

And then there are sights like this. The flood easily pulled the swing set's anchors out of the ground by that bare patch of grass and deposited it wherever it felt.

Or how about a ton of tree trunk. Just one more obstacle from mother nature. I know where this thing was before the flood, so it traveled a long way to get here. It is said that sometimes you can hear a picture. I can definitely smell this one and I don't recommend it.

Afterward, there was much suffering but we were safe and secure so you can't ask for much more than that. We stayed in a family member's camper trailer before a FEMA trailer was moved onto the property. And there we lived for the duration of the recovery.

August 2016-Early 2017 - The Recovery and Teardown

Rather than focusing on the bad, I'd rather talk about the good.

There are so many people that came to our aid during this time, our families most of all but there were quite a few other groups of note.

First Baptist of Covington, First Baptist Church in Zachary, Derek Fife and Arkel Constructors, the Islamic Center of Baton Rouge, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge LDS Temple.

And a special shout out to the whole crew at my former employer, Keta Group. Manville, Ben, Ralph, Al, Lisa, Denise, Brandon, Mike, Amy, Jayden, Price, Kenny, Danielle and Jordan.

March-July 2017 - The rebuild

There's one person that needs to be mentioned before any others. Our late uncle, Thomas (Tommy) Roberts. A retired commercial contractor, he was in his element working on this project and because of him and his experience, we were able to tear down the old house, build the new one and move in within 4 months. All while staying in budget. There is no way we'd be doing as well as we are now without him. And boy, do we miss him.

I also need to thank the following folks. Uncle Thomas' friends who contributed in so many ways to see this project through to the end.

Jody, Buddy, Terry, Dennis and Papa Gary.

In the end, I'm so very thankful for everyone's help. And it was a joy doing all that work with my wife. We ended up building the majority of the interior ourselves and she painted every hardy plank before it went up saving us so much money.

July 2017-2022 - The languish

I know what you're thinking. "Wyatt, isn't this supposed to be about the novel." You're right, you're right. Let's get back on track.

So, just how much writing got done once the flood hit? Absolutely nothing. I promised my wife no other projects until we moved in. For me, that's a big promise but I stuck too it no matter how much my mind wanted to wander. After we moved in, there was still very little progress. I remember having this conversation with her.

"I'm not getting anything done on my projects but I think I'm good with it. What does that mean?"

"I think it means you're content."

"Whoa!"

And I might have stayed that way except for one thing. I thought about the story every day. Even during the flood and rebuild, not a day went by that I didn't think about the story, some element of it or jot down an idea that I could use later. That's how I knew it still had legs. But between a huge increase in work responsibilities and this newfound contendedness, it became so hard to make any progress. It was during this time that I realized, I'm not a pantser.

What's this odd word, you may ask. A pantser is the opposite of a planner. A planner plots out the story, plans everything to make sure there are no surprises and that everything makes sense. A pantser flies by the seat of their pants and hopes everything works out in the end. I had a very loose outline, basically chapter titles, but other than that I let the keys fly. Which led to a first act that rambled off and got lost in the weeds. I had no idea how to continue. I started experimenting with software to help me get back on track. Novel Factory has an incredible step-by-step roadmap tutorial to help with planning everything, interviewing your characters, getting your scenes laid out and storyboarding utilities. But the word processor is kinda weak. Scrivener has a good, stripped down, word preocessor that lets you focus on work but it's planning tools are fairly limited. So I chose a middle path. I adapted all of Novel Factory's planning features into Excel and wrote everything in Scrivener. And I planned and planned and planned. But not to the full extent. I left out just enough details so inspiration still had the opportunity to surface. What does that make me? You guessed it. A plantser! lol

I made some progress, but it was a slow 5 years. There were times I definitely considered quitting and letting it all go but I still couldn't stop thinking about my characters and 2 or 3 books down the line. So, I knew I had to persevere.

2022-2023 - New job, new start

In April 2022, I started a new job with considerably less responsibilities. A job that started at 8 and ended at 5 with no bleed over into my off hours. It was a God send. My off hours were no longer consumed with the job, so my mind had the chance to be creative again. Chapters started flowing but there were a few holes in the plot. You other writers know what I mean. Those sections you skip with the intention to go back and complete. In my case, they were really important sections or chapters I wasn't ready to write yet and didn't know how they would go. Only that they needed to connect chapter X with chapter Z. It turned into an insurmountable challenge that left me gun shy. Again, not sure how to proceed.

July 8th 2023 - Writing Away Refuge (AKA the turning point)

I remember this series of events very well as they are now burned into my memory. One day in June, a lady named Lee dropped a message into the Baton Rouge NaNoWriMo Discord server about a virtual pitch event. All this time, I'd gone by the idea that I'd worry about the publishing side once I had a manuscript ready to go. Oh sure, I've attended the odd workshop or read a blog post on the topic but definitely had no solid idea how to proceed once the manuscript was ready. Out of curiosity, I followed the link to the Writing Away Refuge website.

https://www.writingawayrefuge.com/

There were several literary agents lined up, ready to listen to pitches in July. Well, I still held my idea that I'd worry about this once the manuscript was done. But then I read one of the agent's manuscript wish lists for what she was interested in, and you couldn't have matched my novel any closer. Like she was asking for my story. This felt too much like providence for me to ignore so I signed up.

We actually cut our vacation one day short so I could get home in time to prepare for the meeting. I pitched to all the agents I'd signed up for and every one of them said yes to more material in some way. My mind raced ahead of events. "Oh crap, people are interested. I really need to finish this thing." The details of working with WAR are too much for a quick mention so I'll save them for their own story. The most important thing is that I met Lee Ann Ward. The champion of writers. I've never met anyone, other than perhaps Uncle Thomas, more willing to help people succeed. She really has been there for every single one of my noob questions and now I actually feel competent about the publishing industry.

The whole experience was just the kick in the pants I needed so I buckled down. What surprised me the most was once I forced myself to confront those chapters and sections I'd skipped before, inspiration hit, and I had my path forward. I won't say it was much easier but after surpassing so many obstacles over the years I felt like I finally knew what I was doing. I also learned something extremely important about my process. I'm utterly useless after hours. If I wanted this done, I had to do it during the day. Which meant squeezing it into lunch breaks, weekends and any other time I had off. Massive appreciation to my new job where I wasn't on call 24/7/365.

After six more months, I finally did it. My first draft was done on December 31, 2022. Huzzah!

I can already hear your question. "Yo Wyatt, what're those dates after the first draft?" As every good writer knows, the first draft is just the first of many milestones for a novel. There was so much more work that had to be done.

But that is a tale for another time.

So, there you have it. A harrowing tale of perseverance. Or possibly just good ol' stubbornness.

Until next time, remember, you're never completely dressed until you put on a smile.