I was going through some of my old blog drafts, and I came upon this one. I wrote it three years ago and never posted it for some reason, but oh! How it made me smile! I hope you enjoy it, as well. The current manuscript I was reading was my debut novel, Nameless.
Something pretty exciting happened last night. I was visiting my daughter at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and I was reading my current manuscript aloud while I was rocking her. (I’m finally at that stage of editing. HOORAY!) So I was rocking and reading, reading and rocking. Then I hit the end of my pages, and I went silent.
“What happens next?”
It was a voice from behind me, a man I don’t know. His baby is strapped up to every contraption that mine was strapped to earlier, and this baby won’t be held for a long time, if he ever makes it that far.
She started out with a loooooooot of tubes and wires!
He repeated, “What happens next?”
I can’t tell you how that made me feel. In this crazy room full of broken children and beeping monitors, a stranger was listening to something that I had written, and he wanted to know how it ended. It was an amazing feeling. A beautiful feeling. It stoked the fires of my desire and creativity.
2 Comments on “When A Stranger Asks "What Happens Next?"”
Wow. That is just so cool. But then I’m not surprised, since you, like, rock. 😀
I hear ya. I just told someone the story of how I got started writing. I wrote an opening scene to a novel (thinking I was just screwing around) and shared it with a horror friend on Facebook. She responded with the same thing: “What happens next?” And so it went for three months. When I finished, I had the first draft of my werewolf novel, Blood and Rain.
Without her (Michele), I would probably not be doing this,