When I was writing, the porch didn't have snow. It's much nicer in the summertime!

She knew what she wanted.

She sat on the front porch of their run-down starter home, laptop open. The short story had been a resounding success… with her family and teachers. It could be the scene in a larger work.

The fertility drugs were in overdrive, which made it relatively easy to write the sex scenes. Lots of sex scenes. More sex scenes than a romance novel really needed…

The story went on.

And on.

The characters wanted to do more things… to have a life… it couldn’t just end like that, there was more to tell!

The story grew longer. She didn’t know her wordcount because she’d broken the story into multiple files, intending to put it all together at some later date.

The date never came, but the baby did. And a big sister who had nothing to do with fertility drugs.

The story sat in the back of the proverbial drawer, never to see the light of day.

But that didn’t mean the story was unimportant… it was a first novel. That one that every writer has to write. That baby that every writer has to look at and say “This is not my best work. This never will be, no matter how much editing and revising I do.”

Because without that first novel… without however many “first novels” a writer ends up having, a writer can never write that first professional work.

That baby that grows up, gets a job, and takes care of itself.

That work that gets published.

This memoir was written for the Write On Edge prompt “Unfulfilled.” I still have a hard time writing memoir in first person… the words flow so much better in third person, so I just go with it.

My instant reaction when I saw this prompt was “Oh, yes yes yes! This fits in perfectly with my “What Would Have Been” story about Marie Antionette!” And then I remembered that this was supposed to be memoir… But the theme of WWHB is characters whose lives were cut short without fulfilling their potential.

Oh, and if you’re curious about that story in the back of the drawer, it’s still there. I might completely redo it… someday. The short story was called “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and followed the song lyrics while an AI experienced love at first sight. The longer story was “Big Country” and followed the AI and his friend the bard as they romped through a huge asteroid-turned-space-ship.

The shortlink for this post is http://wp.me/p1qnT4-yy