Happy Saturday, readers!
It has been a hectic week over here in the Reece household. Busy work schedules mingle with family visits. Friends dropped by our home. We said goodbye at the airport.
We seem to live in a constant state of chaos. There’s always one too many dog toys out on the living room floor. Dishes are piled on a corner in the kitchen. Laundry from two days ago is still kept in baskets. The grass we got around to mowing is already overgrown again.
We’re trapped in stagnation. The same vicious cycle repeating every week.
Except, we’re not.
Sure, Tuesday looked like every other Tuesday from the past six months. I went to work. I wrote on my break. I thought about my wife in the widening hours behind the counter of a fast food restaurant.
I did something I’ve never done before, though.
I wrote the last line of my first novel.
Almost twelve years ago now, I decided I was going to be an author. Not because it was my dream job. Not because it was a stable plan for my future. Simply because there were voices in my head and stories in my veins that couldn’t be contained.
Twelve years ago I wrote an incredibly terrible, cliche-filled novel with a loose concept around vampires and romance. Twelve years ago I met a girl who would change my life. She read the whole damn thing.
She told me it was good.
I kept writing. She kept reading. What was terrible and cliche gave way to things that flowed and grew into original concepts that only I could write. Things clicked in my soul. My initial characters were discarded.
I started something new.
That book also didn’t pan out. Nor the next five or six that I really put my determination behind.
I took time off of writing. The girl who was my first reader was my best friend, then my girlfriend, and now my wife. She reminded me to keep going when the reality of the world came crashing down on us. It was never about making money, but breathing into life these concepts that had fueled our beginning relationship.
After years of going round and round about different characters, she convinced me that one of my villains was actually the hero. Ashby Carter became a topic of dinner conversation. We debated his hopes and dreams, his plans and schemes, his loves and losses. More as a challenge to get me out of writer’s block on my main project, my incredible wife dared me to write a few chapters from his point of view.
Something silly. Something nobody but she would ever read.
And she loved it.
So, I wrote more, pushing myself to get a new chapter to her every week and reveling in the way her sharp mind kept pace with all of my new ideas and scenes. Ashby Carter became so much more than a villain concept.
He’s a brother. He’s a man lost out of time. He’s looking for love and is willing to do the worst things to keep it.
On Tuesday we played around with a wedding scene. There’s 120,000 plus words behind the concept of Ashby Carter. He married the love of his life in a google doc page on my iPad this week.
I wrote the last lines of the novel I’ll be polishing over the next few months.
It’s not something profound or completely original. It’s not the character or concept I set out to write twelve years ago. Ashby Carter is so much more.
He’s the living embodiment of growth and love in my relationship to my wife. He’s the proof that I can push myself to finish tough projects. He’s a flower growing through a crack in the concrete of my previous ideas.
So, readers, as you follow along on my writing journey, pay special attention to Ashby Carter.
He’s the character that rescued me from giving up on my dreams.
Reece Writing 