Happy birthday! #MyOnceAndFutureLoveSeries

Today marks the 6th birthday of Jacob and Beth's creation.

Beth and Jacob sprang to life on May 13th, 2007. The very first scene I wrote was her dream in Personal Attention. The original concept of their story was inspired by the episode "What Is and What Should Never Be" of Supernatural, though obviously with no magic or mythical creatures involved. But seeing an alternate version of you life based on what you wished could be? Yeah. Exactly what Beth got, and why she had to choose to let the fantasy go and wake up.

The story expanded from there. I had around 35,000 words by November 2008 (despite Tech Guy being laid off in April), and reached 50,000 in March 2009.

2010, well, that was the year of family deaths. I lost my dad and grandfather 6 months apart, so obviously, I wasn't feeling inspired to write.

The first half of their story was finally done by April 2011, with the original version novel going up May 13, 2011. I figured it was long enough, that the open-ended happy ending of them committed and in love was enough, but by the end of summer requests were coming in for more.

In September 2011, I injured my right shoulder and arm. It's a chronic problem since that causes pain, weakness, tingling, numbness, etc.

Took until November 2011 to make up my mind about even attempting to add to Beth and Jacob's story. And November 2011 wasn't pleasant. I started the month with the worst stomach flu I'd ever had in my life, and that was just the start of everything that was going wrong.

For 2012, I was in too much pain at the computer to attempt typing much until July, but I still put up the short story Turn the Page (a song title, actually) on May 13th. This covered one week for Jacob and Beth, between Christmas and New Year's, and finished Jacob's foreign tour. It's now the ending of Personal Attention.

So where does the end of their story, book 3, stand now? 24,313 words of a rewrite. Because it definitely needed a rewrite. I can't write happy content when my life is full of crap. I've mentioned that before, but I'll repeat it again. I'm not one of those people who made up and wrote stories as a little child. I didn't start writing fiction until 2005 and it's still not natural to me. It's not where my innate talents lie. So, I had 35,000 words of material to start with and I've rewritten 24k so far. And this is still a hard book. Hardest book I've ever tried to work on. I do it because you all keep asking for it. I'd be happy working on any of the other dozen or so ideas in my Work-in-Progress folder right now.

And that's the history of the My Once and Future Love series to date.