What's scarier than being pregnant for the first time? Few things. Guess what makes being pregnant for the first time even scarier? Googling pregnancy stories. Looking online for reassurance. Anxiety and pregnancy are happy bedfellows. Unfortunately, many women are all too delighted to share their horror stories online. Thus, this internet search and a budding baby in the oven is not a winning combo.
But, it was too late. I’d done it to myself. Twelve weeks pregnant, terrified, on the brink of a full-blown panic attack. Eight more months of horror awaited me and at the end of that rainbow a ruined body, saggy tits, and a loose vagina, that’s what the internet promised me. What could I do to reassure myself? I don’t have any friends with children. My mom passed away. Who could I turn to for support?
This was the beginning of my strange writing path. In a way, my writing journey began when I was a child listening to my dad spin his yarns at the dinner table. When I was six/seven years old and first began creating stories with a computer program, Storybook Weaver. In my teens, writing my first novels. But, in another way, it began here: with my pregnancy blog.
I decided to write a blog that would focus on the positive aspects of pregnancy. It’s true, I’d never been pregnant before, but I knew it couldn’t be all bad. I wanted to be the optimistic light that I’d gone searching for in the darkness of the internet. I wanted to provide that comfort for future women. So, I called it Positive Preggos. It was an incredible outlet for me to channel my anxieties and reframe scary things. And it worked! I had women writing me about how helpful it was, how much they wish they’d read these sorts of posts when they were pregnant. But this blog would be more than just a healthy channel for my anxiety. This blog was my gateway into the writing community on Twitter.
By now, I had a finished novel sitting and waiting on my laptop. It took me two and a half years to finish and with the help of a pandemic keeping me inside and a pregnancy urging me forward (I was convinced I’d have zero time to write once the baby was born), I finally typed “the end” on my first novel. I knew that I wanted to be traditionally published but I had zero clue how to begin that journey. I didn’t even know what a query was! It was through engaging with the writing community that I began to learn. I started off with writers’ lifts, senselessly plugging my blog and link-dropping… and through this, I saw just how many self-published books were out there! There was this entire indie author community that I’d never even heard of. Maybe self-publishing was the route for me?
That’s why I decided to give self-publishing a test run. A short story I’d written a couple of years prior was too long to publish in any magazine and too short to be considered a novel. Voila! A novella was born. I self-published The Right Thing in January 2021 mainly to test-run what I thought of the process. Wow, the instant gratification was such a rush! People were buying my book—something I had written! I was getting paid for a story that I’d created! This was nothing short of incredible.
And this was how it started for me. Now, I have a self-published book with over a hundred copies sold. My first novel is in the process of getting a rewrite. When I’m done with that, I will continue querying. I’ll be sure to keep you all posted as my journey continues.
I’d love to hear from you. Where did your writing journey begin? What is your origin story: comment below!
ps if you’re pregnant or thinking of it down the road, my message is still the same: don’t be scared! My pregnancy was a hundred percent better than the dumpster fire of despair I thought it would be. It wasn’t a cakewalk every day, but there were a lot of positives to take away from the experience. My body is not ruined. Childbirth was endurable. And now I have the most beautiful kiddo imaginable. So don’t be scared!