Recombobulating with fingers crossed (I wrote a book)

I began writing books back in 2005 after a bizarre experience with a string of rare individuals. I couldn’t help myself. Every morning, I woke, plopped down in front of the laptop, and tapped out the story unfolding in my noggin. Five months later, I had most of a novel. Then life told me to focus that time on paying work, and I let my 16 of 18 chapters gather computer dust. A year later, I tapped out the final two chapters on a short train trip, after which, I deposited my novel on a backup hard drive and largely forgot about it. The two people who read it both had strong emotional reactions, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of writing it, yet I was sure I was a designer, not a writer.

That’s the same story I told myself in my last quarter at design school in 1988, when after completing my work two weeks early, I sat in the computer lab tapping out fiction, while a classmate told me I should be a writer.

Fast forward to my earning a BFA at Antioch University, where my professors said from day one (well, maybe day two), “Kelly, you are obviously a writer,” which finally sunk in by the time of my final year.

In school, I wrote several books, exploring different genres, including fiction, nonfiction, business, memoir, and children’s. After graduation, it was time to choose which one to edit and publish. So I’m doing them all.

Well, I chose memoir to start. Since I’ve never been terribly interested in dishing dirt (although it turns out there is plenty of that in the book, purely for illustrative purposes), my memoir is about social change.

I completed another round of editing Tuesday, and began querying agents yesterday. Now comes the waiting, but it’s not as if I have ever been in a hurry on this. I can wait no problem, but the material—according to my professors—needs to get out into public dialog now. Fingers crossed, I will begin talking about it here when it gets picked up.

Somehow, the experience of working full time running Train of Thought while also in school full time at Antioch taught me how to get the most out of every day. I now know how to juggle and balance work, writing, and my other passion of type design, while occasionally sleeping and eating. This is the new, recombobulated* me.

*
Recombobulate = antonym of discombobulate. Interestingly, there are no official antonyms for decompose or discombobulate, which is odd because Humpty Dumpty was put back together again, I’m sure. Oh wait, it appears Urban Dictionary has made it a word.