Better late than never: Home Planet's origin story

When I was a kid (and up until I was about 29.5, which to be fair is still mainly a kid in my mind these days) I said I’d write a book before I turned 30.

Readers, she would not write a book before she turned 30.

In fact, after college, I did not write anything longer than a blog post until about 5 years ago when I started my Master’s program for, you guessed it, writing.

In March of 2020, something really big happened in my world. I’m talking about starting graduate school of course.

Yes, friends. I start my Master’s degree the same month the world went into a full lock down. For two years, I balanced virtual coursework (luckily writing for me is fine as a solitary pursuit), parenting three young children, working, and the pandemic. The bright side was that the experience taught me the discipline required to parse out time for writing. A skill that helped me create Home Planet, my debut novel coming out this September.

One of my last courses in my program was “Writing the Novella” and the seed of this book started in that course. Pushing myself to write the first half of a novella, which was about 15,000 words (or 30ish pages in Google docs) in a 10-week sprint helped me understand what kind of time I’d need to get serious about writing a novel. (If you’re curious, Home Planet’s word count is about 10 times that cute little half-novella project.)

The story I eventually wrote is quite different than what I started with, but the character of Bryn and the idea of pregnancy and space were part of this experience and it’s what launched the novel coming out this fall.

As things tend to do, I graduate and promptly fell off the writing bandwagon. I’d pick it back up for a day here and there, tried to rally around NaNoWriMo (RIP), but I didn’t really begin writing a novel again until about a year later when I went on a writing retreat in Ireland. Throughout a week-long series of workshops and writers' saloons (much more boring than they sound unless you love listening to people’s first pages and half-baked story ideas 🙋‍♀️) I wrote the first chapter of Bryn’s story. More importantly, I realized there was something captivating about the story. Something that made people want to know… what happens next? (The favorite thing to happen for a story teller.)

A couple of months after returning home from that trip, I was accepted into a writer’s residency program at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, where I spent another 5 days writing the next few chapters of the story. By the time I got back to Denver, Bryn had her hooks in me. I signed up for the 8-week Productivity Club with Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop which meant I paid to spend 4 hours every Sunday working on the draft. I paired it with a Wednesday night block of time (shout out to my local Whole Foods for feeding me in salad bars and wi-fi during this time) and over the course of a year finally finished the first of many drafts.

All this to say, writing this novel took a lot of concentrated effort. Effort to carve out the time. Effort to make myself see the story through to the end. Some times I would sit at the Whole Foods for 4 hours and type 100 words. Other times, they’d be kicking me out while I tried to finish one last section. Writing is finicky, but what they say is true. If you keep showing up, eventually the words will come out.

After working with both a developmental editor and a line editor, which added about another year of rewriting and restructuring this story, Home Planet will be published this September through Atmosphere Press. There are many reasons I opted for a hybrid published (a story for another time) but I’ve been happy with the process and I was beyond excited when I received the paperback proof copy of my book recently.

Now I find myself at the precipice of keeping my promise to my childhood self and I want to say thanks to you for joining me on this journey. Even if no one ever read the book, I’d be proud of the accomplishment. But in writing Bryn’s story I hope that it will entertain some of you, help you lose yourself in another world the way good books do, or remind you that there’s so much out in the world we may not know and create a little bit more wonder the next time you look up at the stars.

Stay tuned for details on pre-orders, and if you’d like to help me set up a book launch, book signing, or book club event in your town/neighborhood please let me know. I’d love to have friends along the way of this journey.

Until next time,
Tiffany 💜