A LONGTERM DREAM HAS NOW BEEN FULFILLED

Nowadays I’m interested in a variety of things. Yet there are a small handful of topics which have been a passion since the very beginning of my life. One of the things that is definitely included within this small handful is writing. I have enjoyed writing material for as long as I have been practicing communication and forming language.

Up until my lower secondary years of school, I would enjoy writing short stories during my free time at home. As soon as my mum purchased our first computer, I would type up the stories that I wrote, then I would print them out to illustrate. In primary school, the word count for my stories was usually 1000 words, and in high school that number expanded to around 1500 words.

 Initially I would write about personal creations that amused me, including a pair of sisters named “The Kids”. Up until the age of ten it always irked me whenever my sister and I were referred to by that title. So I made up amusing stories about two “kids”, with all of the characteristics which adults seemingly thought that I myself had. Thus, by mocking those irksome assumptions, it made the whole situation much more entertaining.

There were also stories I created (as a seven year old) about an outlaw named “Mustard”, and admittedly he was so villainous that he gave me nightmares, well into my teenage years. In those stories, Mustard was at first an ai device created in a lab as a scientific experiment, and was given the name “Joshua No. 9”. However he (unintentionally) ended up being extremely evil, and after he escaped the lab he renamed himself Mustard. He was also so skilled with his horrid acts that nobody could ever capture him. But whenever “Mustard was in town” everyone would be absolutely frantic.

Once I had entered my teenage years, I began writing non-fiction material about my medical conditions. Those would either be the length of a blog, or that of a short book. I continued that hobby until my early twenties, and it was my dream to become an author some day. But in 2011 (at the age of 21) I had to temporarily put the hobby aside, because I was kept very busy with all of the tests required to get my HSAM diagnosis.

That then led to me regularly being involved in media stories, from 2015 to the present day. Despite that being a lot of work, many people began asking me about whether I had written a book about HSAM (or if I were planning to write one). Therefore, my goal of becoming an author was again prioritised.

 Yet in order for a book to be an appropriate length to get published (even 40,000 words is an extremely short book) a great deal of time is involved. Though in three years I did manage to write a 103,000 word manuscript. That was about my life experience with HSAM, and a chronological recount of every entertaining thing that I’ve personally lived through, from birth to my thirtieth birthday.

 But it didn’t take long for me to realise that in addition to writing such a large number of words, even more time is added to the process when it comes to editing a book. In fact editing 103,000 words actually takes longer than initially writing them! The main reason for this is because every thousand word section requires at least six read-overs until it’s error free. Now, just multiply 1000 by 103!

                                                                 

Then, once that job is completed, the time comes when we have to reach out to literary agents and line editors. Receiving a large amount of knock-backs is virtually inevitable, yet we have to keep persisting until we eventually find someone (or someplace) who accepts our manuscript. That’s very time consuming because each person/place has to be approached separately, and usually we have to wait three months in order to know whether they’ve accepted our work or not. For me, that process took two long years, until finally my manuscript got accepted by a publishing house, named Echo Publishing.

  It’s true that the book isn’t due to be released until later next month (of August 2024), and that I’ve got all of the events/launches ahead of me. That too will involve a very large amount of work. However, I can now say that I’ve officially accomplished my longterm dream of becoming a published author! At this current moment (prior to doing more work for the upcoming phase) I can enjoy myself by savouring the very thought that I ended up fulfilling my childhood dream.