Welcome to my Wild West!

November turned out not-so-busy, thankfully. With a down-tick of calls at work, I was able to get a lot written and set a personal record for the most words written in a day and in a month.

As much as I wanted to blast this all over Facebook Pages and Discord Servers, I held back after hitting my goal of 65k. Oh, I kept writing every day. Some days, I literally wrote just one word. Some crap happened, and that was all I could do.

I’ve been on that side of working two to four jobs and really wanting to fully participate in NaNo, but having very little time and absolutely no mental energy for it. Seeing posts about people who were overachieving at NaNo made me feel like a failure. 

My success this year is thanks to available time, being able to live off a single income, and having a job that doesn’t leave me so mentally drained that I can’t decide what to eat for supper, and I know that.

The working title on this story is Abiding, but after some thought, I will switch it. I have bounced a few ideas around in my head, some of which flirted with changes to the titling of my two existing novels, but that’s generally not recommended, so I will leave those alone.

I plan to set all of my westerns around the fictional town of Black Coulee, Montana Territory. Please don’t get the idea that these stories will turn into a mail-order bride series, because it won’t. I’m a strong believer that women can, and do, have dreams beyond getting married and having babies.

Which is actually a theme of Abiding. The female MC is trapped progressively deeper into a marriage she doesn’t want and knows isn’t right for her. Instead of another, more “suitable” man rescuing her through marriage, she finds her own internal strength to tell society, in the form of her overbearing mother, to essentially jump off a cliff.

By the end, she begins a tentative relationship with the male MC, but I’m stopping the story short of the “happily ever-after.” That might come along in a sequel or be left open for the reader’s imagination.

I’m sure a few reviews will eventually come back that the ending is a disappointment. I’ll have no control over whether a reader sees it as a romance, but I do have an obligation to make it clear that both MCs have a character arch that does not require falling in love to complete.

My motivation in this stems from a revulsion of storylines that indicate ease of success. Too often, romantic stories tip their hand early who will get together with whom, and readers know exactly how they will overcome their difficulties. 

One of the reasons I love the Korean Drama Crash Landing on You is that the ending is not perfect. There is nothing fairytale about it, but the MCs make the best of what they get and their love still grows.

It’s the antithesis of a Taylor Swift song, and that’s not just by virtue of the platform length. Life isn’t always easy. Finding love is no easier. It’s a messy business filled with conflict mitigation, finding a partner’s triggers and learning to avoid them, and being triggered yourself and learning how to communicate those to your partner. The deeper the traumas of life run, the longer it takes to build a relationship.

Not everyone wants to read reality. I get that. There are plenty of the clean, gritless romance stories out there. I want to offer something a little different.

I have a couple thousand more words to write on Abiding before I shelve it to finish Draft One of Wretched Road, which is also a working title for my 1930’s fiction piece. This gives me enough distance from each story to gain a more objective view on the plot and what works and doesn’t work for it. Three scenes already face the chopping block, and a couple characters will get some tweaking.

My current goal is to have one of these ready for beta reading by May. I want both ready for beta reads by June. If anyone is interested in this, please email me at tw@tommiewendall.com and let me know which story you’re interested in reading.

Thanks to all you folks who cheered me on through this last month! Congratulations to those who reached your goals! Here’s to the next few months of editing and prepping for publication!