Once Upon A Time I Wrote A Novel

And Writing Community Brought It To The World

Once upon a time I wrote a novel. In fact, if I am being honest, I’ve done it a number of times thanks to the litany of writing challenges the Internet has to offer my over-producing brain. However, once upon a time I wrote a novel I wholeheartedly believed would change my life.

And, again, if I am being honest, I have admit that it has.

Girl, Unplugged stretched me far beyond my wildest dreams of my post-teaching life. While I wrote it, Girl, Unplugged brought me to local writing group events, conventions, numerous writing panels, book events, writing courses, and PitchWars 2016. Due to all of the experiences of collaboration and conversation around the creation and revision of this novel, I became convinced that writing was not, as I had once believed, a solitary affair. I knew to garner success I needed to stop writing alone in all my projects. I also felt compelled to tell all other up and coming writers to do the same. Girl, Unplugged is the reason Stop Writing Alone ever even came to fruition.

Girl, Unplugged was not the first or last novel I ever wrote, it may not even stand the test of time, but it has made the greatest impact on my life of any of my writing. As of this morning, it is now fully accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I owe this novel that. It was never meant to be mine alone.

Nearly two years ago, when I started my Substack experiment, part of that experiment included a Substack page devoted to my fiction where I would share short stories along with serializing the often discussed, but never seen Girl, Unplugged. I called the Substack page Story Hoarder because, in a Stop Writing Alone community call, both

Jackie Dana

and Al Carter confronted me with the fact that while they, and a small group of community members, had been exposed to my writing in various live events, the world at large hadn’t. We concluded together that I was, intentionally or not, a story hoarder and it was time I shared my hoard.

I loved showing up to my Story Hoarder page. New chapters of Girl, Unplugged were released on Wednesdays and short stories on Fridays, however, like so many passion projects, I kept up with it until I didn’t.

Burnout for me doesn’t look like a conflagaration, it is the dispersion of the smoke afterward.

For me, the fire is in the doing — I come in strong, hot, destroy all things in my way and make things happen. I am seen and felt and I make impressions. I see that now. In my best of times I can be an unignorable flame. I’m not as gentle as I might hope to be. I can be a lot, so, to save the world around me, I spread myself wide — a podcast, a youtube channel, a live community, a mighty networks community page, a community substack page, a fiction substack page, a Voxer group, a collection of Marco Polo groups, social media, social media, social media, then I mom a bit, I wife a bit, I take on weird roles like head of the bus stop group text, and I hobby

a

lot.

I take my inner inferno and spread it out among these endless candles in an effort to light my way in this world. Sometimes one blows out and not a lot of people notice, it doesn’t change the temperature in the room. The whisp of smoke disperses, life moves on and I tell myself, I knew no one would notice.

Then a second candle, and a third, and most times I notice the dimming and I take a minute to relight myself to be present in the world.

In 2023, I let the winds blow. Candle after candle extinguished. YouTube, podcast, Story Hoarder, social media, piled up messages on Voxer, on Marco Polo… I ghosted everything. It got creatively dark and cold. Only one small votive remained: my commitment to writing community.

I showed up to my meetings here in Stop Writing Alone. I showed up to the meetings for the Prompt Party collaboration with Fictionistas.

Honestly, I felt ill-equipped to keep all my candles alight in such a windy world.

Thank God it only takes one tiny spark to relight a fire.

Yesterday in the

Stop Writing Alone

Type & Talk meeting a group of writers came together celebrating their November successes, still chomping at the bit to meet all their own personal and project goals for the year. It was a meeting of working writers — everyone with a project before them. Who was writing short fiction, nonfiction, epic novels, resurrecting old projects? We met over words and crafting sentences and projects and the silly bit of how the heck do you organize your files, because it applies to us all and we are writers with goals whether they are to be traditionally published, self-published, or just getting our words into the world.

My little flame was glowing after those two hours. I dare say I felt fired up!

Then, later in the afternoon, there was the monthly

Fictionistas

community call, where we were all asked to leave the call asking ourselves why we came to Substack in the first place, to reconnect with our purpose here. With my inner flame growing, my soul warming, and this question telling me to turn my light toward my “why,” I woke this morning, to a Stop Writing Alone Write In Wednesday with the desire to relight one of my extinguished candles.

I drafted Girl, Unplugged in 2012.

It won me a mentorship with author Austin Aslan in PitchWars 2016 and garnered agent interest in 2017.

In 2018, I launched a podcast called Stop Writing Alone inspired by the lessons learned during the writing and revision of Girl, Unplugged.

In 2020 I began the first Stop Writing Alone Happy Campers Club writing intensives live on Zoom for writers. It was to replicate the experiences I had on my journey of writing Girl, Unplugged, it ended up being a sanity saver for a group of humans when the world imploded.

In 2022, those intermittent writing intensives grew into a year long committment to writing community with the Stop Writing Alone Substack.

All of this is to say, that I get thet you may not be interested in reading an old young adult novel written by a novice writer. EMPs and blackouts in New York City as backdrops for the crush-y feelings of an insecure teenage girl from Staten Island might not be your thing, but if you have been served by this space and this community in any way, I promise you Girl, Unplugged deserves a little celebration today.

And all of this is also to say:

Thank you, always, for helping me keep my tiny candle collection lit.