My lovey made this for me for V-Day.

I have a legitimate excuse for not posting anything on my website since December:  I’ve lost my mind.

It’s true. Where once I was a mild-mannered, well-researched non-fiction food, cocktail, and humor writer, everything changed when I started writing a novel.

What non-fiction writer of sound mind would start writing fiction? Exactly.

It all started while we were on vacation in Florida for the month of January. Despite the best of intentions, I hardly tapped at my keyboard, except to type captions for the pictures of tiki cocktails I uploaded to Facebook. And then the novel hit me like the flu. No matter how hard I tried to hold it down, I couldn’t keep myself from vomiting words onto the page.

Now that I’m at 7000+ words, I have to admit it’s a progressive illness. A grave illness. Because I’m not just writing any novel: it’s young adult book. Like Twilight, but gay and without the vampires, or like Harry Potter, but gay and with more romance, or like the Hunger Games, but gay and no one has to kill each other.

The novel-writing bug definitely makes me uncomfortable, especially when it comes to character development. When writing non-fiction, your characters are already developed; your job is just to get to know them. With fiction, the process is much more mysterious. The characters are not pre-formed, nor can you force them to develop. I have had to wait patiently for my characters to show themselves to me on their terms, especially the teenage boy. He and I have been at a standoff all week.  Most of my free time is spent trying to get to know him, and I’m sure my friends are growing tired of me talking about someone who only exists in head.

Though my mind is deeply lost, I swear I have accomplished a few other things in the past month. For example, I baked a chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day and ate the whole thing myself. (It was quite an amazing feat.) While in Florida, Leah and I (mostly Leah) blogged at www.alligatorteardrop.com.  And today I spent some productive time on Pinterest.

Ha! Believe me, the words “productive” and “Pinterest” don’t belong in the same sentence. Any writer who says they use Pinterest to help them research their characters is either avoiding researching their characters, or is obsessively pinning pictures of shoes and weddings.

On that note, please feel free to follow my Shoe and Wedding boards on Pinterest.  (www.pinterest.com/drinkmywords)