About Me:
Hi, I'm Annie Laurie Gray. Yeah like the old Scottish song.
It's a poem too by William Douglas. But I wasn't name after those. I was named
after my great-grandmother.
Here's an interesting fact: I think my name gave me a love of
wanting to know more about names. I want to know anything about names from the
meaning, how to pronoun, and to the family history behind how you got that name.
Another fact: I was born with hearing loss. I was born seven
weeks early and lucky to be alive. Lucky that all that wrong with me was the
hearing loss. Due to my hearing loss, and the fact that I couldn't hear (really
I mean I couldn't understand a word said) in the lunchroom I daydreamed a lot
as a child and teenager. Add in a love of story. (Any story: T.V. shows, movies
or books,) it's no surprise I wanted to be a writer.
What I really want to tell you is: I have a goal. In a year I
want to enter #Pitchwars. Every year it's start in August. I wanted to enter
this contest for a few years now. I discovered it on twitter. I noticed a tweet
about someone wanting a book, but it looked like an agent wish list but the
person was not an agent but a published author. The tweet had a link that lead
to the person wish list. Turned out that it was a wish list for a writing
contest, and the person posting the wish list would be a mentor for a one lucky
writer. I searched the wish list of a more of the mentors and realized that the
novel I just started...well it fit the list. This knowledge encouraged me to write
the novel. I wanted to be that lucky
writer!
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| Click for more information on Pitch Wars #Pitchwars |
But every year when August rolled around I saw all the tweets
about Pitch Wars but my novel wasn't ready. Plus I hated what I had written.
November would come and I would try again to write my novel.
I loved the fact that I had a hard of hearing heroine like me, but the rest I
never liked. For one I was writing about a thirteen year old, but I would start
writing a love story meant for someone older. Finally I decided that my heroine
need a older teenager. Also I was trying to write a contemporary novel. I was
trying to show the life of someone with hearing loss.
I hated it.
I felt like my life was about more than my hearing loss, even
though my hearing loss influence my life every day, it's not my life. Why was I
making it the life of my character? Also I noticed I was explaining what being
hard of hearing was to my reader. I wanted to write about my character falling
in love, and what it meant to her life, not how a hearing person need to see a
person with hearing loss.
The other thing I was trying to write contemporary novel. I
love reading contemporary novels but I wanted to write a story that hinting at
something greater then ourselves. I wanted to write about God but not write a
Christian novel. I wanted to write about the supernatural but again not
something that took away from the contemporary story that I loved to read. I
had a hard time finding a good balance between contemporary and paranormal.
I finally found something called Magical Realism and this
helped me write what I hope was a modern fairy tale that featured my hard of
hearing heroine.
So last month (August) #Pitchwars rolled around again. Again
my novel was not ready. But I knew I had a good story, finally. I wanted to
enter so bad that I grained my teeth to the point that I had TMJ,
(Temporomandibular joint dysfunction) Yeah, I wanted to enter that bad.
So I decided that I'm going to fix my plot holes, make my
good story into a great story and enter next year. I would like to share my journey
over the next year, here on my blog. I hope you follow me on my journey and it encourage
you to follow your own dreams.
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