(Apologies to Lewis Carroll for mangling his famous riddle, but I couldn’t make the Raven fit!)
I turned 43 a week ago, which is fine by me. I have to admit, I’m loving my forties. My thirties went by in a wonderful, manic rush of house moves and babies and toddlers and general child-rearing delicious craziness. Not that I’m done with child-rearing (who is, ever?), but now, at 10 and 12, they’re young people with their own firm opinions and busy schedules. I have time of my own again and it’s quite frankly wonderful.
I started writing novels the year I turned 40. For over 20 years I had written nothing but poetry (some of it not bad; one was even published) and cringingly awful ‘literary’ diaries (the diaries were really, really bad; I eventually came to my senses and threw them all out).
Writing was a passion, a compulsion, but one I didn’t dare give in to, too busy with jobs and dating and marriage and babies. So I scribbled little bits here, and little bits there, always telling myself that one day, someday, when I was ready, I would write.
I was never ready.
I kept putting it off. There was always a reason. I was too tired, too busy. Then suddenly I turned 40 and I realized I wasn’t really too tired any more. The nights of wakeful babies and toddlers were long gone. There was no reason to rush through my to-do list while the children were in preschool so I could give them my full attention when they got home; they were elementary school kids now, and free time was more about Minecraft than finger painting. It was a light bulb moment. There was no reason I couldn’t do the laundry in the afternoon instead.
There were no more reasons.
I worked out that I could get in a good two hours of work each day before I had to pick up the kids from school at lunchtime (we lived in Brazil, so shorter school hours). In August that year I began writing a middle grade story, and two months later I was typing those magic words ‘The End.’
Now, it was only a short 20,000-word novel, but it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was a ‘real’ story. And I was hooked. By December I’d written the second and third in what I had planned out as a 4 book series. It felt amazing!
Since that 40th birthday a lot has happened. I joined a very supportive online SFF forum with a busy writers community. I moved to the USA and joined the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators). I went to my first writer’s conference, found a critique group and honed my skills. My word count crept up and up as I moved from those first 20k-word novels to 80k YA novels.
I’ve met other writers since then who had the same sort of light bulb moment. For many it was growing children, for others retirement, or a change in job circumstance. There’s no universal ‘right’ moment, just the moment when it all suddenly makes sense to you, personally.
But eventually, that moment arrives. And it shines.
Light bulb.
Juliana Spink Mills 