I do a considerable amount of writing in my life. I’ve spent the past eight years writing a historical novel. I also teach ELA and Creative Writing to middle school students. So whenever I have students free write, I usually write along with them. The free writing I have done with them for the past several years has been about my novel.

Now that my novel has been published, I am still busy with it. But it is a different kind of busy. Instead of writing, I interact with people who have read it, participate in book discussions, and promote my book at various events. So now, when I have time to free-write on my own or with my students, I write about whatever wanders through my mind.

However, I have recognized a problem with this; now, I am trapping people in their own lives. Let me explain. A while back, I brought a character to life by writing for a considerable amount of time about her. During this period, her father died, so she took a chance to go out on her own. You see, she was locked into the structured life of a woman in the 1800s but wanted to follow her own path. So, after moving to a tiny, yellow house at the end of a dock overlooking a lake, she made friends with the older couple she rented from. She also made waves when she took on a more manly job at the local mercantile. She survived a violent storm and was ready to revisit her family but didn’t make it because I stopped writing about her. I think about this young woman sometimes and how she sacrificed to reach her dreams. She was struggling but had overcome so many obstacles and was doing well. But I feel as if I’ve abandoned her, and she can’t progress because she is trapped in this part of her life until I finish writing about her.

I left another woman in Norway alone and in a severe blizzard. She lives in today’s world, so she will be fine, but she hasn’t met her kind, elderly neighbor yet, the one who will change her perspective and her life. She’s been sheltering in the small red house she’s renting, in a blizzard, and knitting a scarf now for several months. I’m sure she would enjoy getting warm and moving on with her life (and I wonder how long that scarf is by now). Again, in my mind, she is a real person, living a full life, but she is trapped in time until I decide to write more about her.

And I won’t even begin to describe the lives of the two little girls, sisters actually, standing in the middle of a dusty road in Denmark. They are between two large buildings with the North Sea behind them; they live in the late 1700s. I could go on with other examples, but I think you get the idea. 

I don’t quite know what to do with all of these stories. Of course, I would like to keep writing each of them to give these trapped individuals a chance to continue their lives. But in the meantime, they will have to float through my thoughts and haunt me until they are free to leap onto paper for others to read.

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If you haven’t had a chance to read my historical novel yet, here are some links.

Amazon: Available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle and Kindle Unlimited

Kindle Preview: Free Kindle Book Preview

Ingram Spark: Paperback

Historical Slant Website: These are signed paperback or hardcover books