The Journey of Writing and Publishing my First Novel
I began writing when I was eleven years old but I didn't begin my first full-length novel until seven years later at eighteen years old. In between that time I'd started and stopped so many books, most not making it past five chapters, I guess I hadn't really found my groove yet. I tried fan-fiction and urban to start because that was what my mother's library consisted of. Author's like Zane, Wahida Clark, KiKi Swanson and more but, for me, they were just fun to read I could never successfully finish one. Then, in the ninth grade, I found Twilight and my love for young adult novels began. I couldn't get enough of them so by senior year I'd read over seventy young adult novels then I started my own.
It started with the song Skin by Zola Jesus, there's a lyric in the song that goes "in the city you find pain" and one day as I listened to it a little, slow moving scene played in my mind of a man running through the street, pushing through crowds, looking for someone. Two lays later I had a pretty macabre dream about a girl getting her head banged against a brick wall. When I woke up that morning I knew I had to write something, anything because I felt that those two things played out for a reason. So, I started Cozen which was 'I Saw it in His Eyes' originally, the title is quite laughable now but it was a start.
When the writing actually started I was ecstatic, confident and just flat out ready to dive in but all those feelings began to dwindle as the chapters piled on. I'm sure most writers experience doubt and can relate to the things I was feeling but at the time I thought my dream was ending. All I felt was doubt and with every word I wrote I thought "this is dumb", "that doesn't make any since", "who would read this" and that went on for weeks, months even before I snapped out of it. I had support from a number of people around me and that helped me a lot, I don't even think they know how much, but they are the reason Cozen is finished today.
I also had motivation from the Wattpad community after I began uploading chapters in August of 2014. It wasn't because people were voting or commenting either, I found satisfaction in knowing that people were reading my book at all. It was a really small audience compared to the stories I'd read on the site but it still felt great and I loved uploading chapters knowing that someone out there was reading along. So I kept at it, still to this day Cozen has less than five thousand reads on Wattpad but a great deal of credit goes to the few who did take time to read my little baby. If you are a new writer or even a self published writer like myself, Wattpad is a great place to develop a fan base for your books and I highly recommend it.
Jump to 2015 where I find Amazon kdp and from there Createspace. Once I had my eyes on those sites I was way too eager to have my book in my hand and ended up uploading an unedited mess for people to find. I took a photo of a red rose in my front yard, cut out the background on "paint", replaced it with a black background and I was off, nobody could tell me anything. Until one day, after finishing a school assignment, a teacher asked me about my book. I didn't think she was actually going to read our work so on this assignment I 'd mentioned Cozen and she stopped me a few days after to talk about it. Soon is spread throughout the school, mostly with the staff, and I started thinking "did I make it the best I possibly could?" so I dove back into the world of teenage romance, deception and betrayal that I'd created to fix it.
The book was filled with grammar mistakes(probably still is), the formatting was terrible, it didn't have any page number, just a word document full of run on sentences and no spaces between chapters printed onto 300+ pages. But it was still my baby so I spent three weeks going through it word after word editing it to the best of my untrained ability. Now it's live and making me proud everyday. Not because so many copies have been sold because becoming famous was not my goal when I began writing and it still isn't, but that's for a different article, Cozen is still making me proud because it is the biggest accomplishment of my life. I feel a sense of pride by just seeing the cover because I know that's something I did. A story made my thoughts, my ideas, a story that survived my own doubts and negative comments from others, it still managed to make it through and that's enough for me.
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