Let me set the scene.
I was in my spring-cleaning mode this week and was clearing out the shelves in our home office, going through old dollar store crates I’ve had for close to a decade, and I found this, my very first completed manuscript I printed out in 2014 the same year I wrote the story.
It’s the first completed story (full-length and not a short), I’ve ever completed. A NaNoWriMo project. And though I’ve never published it, me finding it is a moment, it’s significant. Because not only is it my very first book, but I’m finding it close to a week before I release my 35th self-published story.
If you remember, I counted this time. We’re at a milestone!
But back to this manuscript.
So, I find this manuscript and I literally stop what I’m doing, distracted, because I’m sentimental like that. In a room full of spring-cleaning mess, I sit, and I read this raw, unedited stack of papers from start to finish – albeit interruptions from everyone who always needs me in my house – and I’m in complete awe by the time I reach the end.
The working title of the story is She Vacationed in Hell and is about a woman who uproots her life and follows her fiancé to a completely unfamiliar state, a vacation town, with the promise of them building a new life together. He has this new incredible job, and she’s just sold on this dream he’s painted of the two of them creating their happily every after in this new place. So, she’s in this new city. And he’s at this new job where instead of doing his job, he falls in “love” with someone else and pulls a move that would make Michael Beach’s character from Waiting to Exhale and Steve Harris’s character from Diary of a Mad Black Woman look like characters from Disney. Anyway, the guy in my story tells our girl that he’s found who his wife really is and he’s leaving her. And does. Our girls – Charell, is her name by the way – gives him his ring back, and he re-gifts the damn engagement ring to you know who. Whew! (Side note: I feel like I used that situation in another story. I’m not sure, but anyway…) So, our girl, Charell, Char for short, leaves the new place they share, as if she had an actual choice, makes a new home in this mediocre timeshare and is just down bad. She can’t find work, she doesn’t know anyone in the town she’s in. She refuses to return to the state she previously lived in, because her mother is the ex’s enabler (you read that right). Charell’s mother convinces Charell her ex will come to his senses and want her back, which he does. But before that, Charell’s in this timeshare and it’s okay, but her mind is in hell, therefore she’s in hell, and she’s just every brand of unhappy you can think of. She’s shaped her life around someone other than herself, which is the root of her issues, but she’s too far gone to see that at this point. Her dark thoughts bring her to a place where she’s pawning shit to buy a weapon and using that weapon to scare the air out of her ex-fiancé’s lungs. She ends up at this coffee shop. Just at her lowest of the lowest moments because not only did she try to take her ex out making her an excellent subject for an episode of Oxygen’s Snapped, risking her freedom on someone who has already showed her who they are, but she feels even worse about being brought to the point of wanting to do all that. And at her lowest in that coffee shop, she meets a guy, an exceptional man, who owns a meditation/wellness studio because look at God. Exceptional guy invites Charell to attend a class. She goes. Her attending is impactful, and this starts the catalyst of the change she inevitably needs. Because there, at this studio and all the places, attending this studio attracts to her, Charell starts a journey of healing, self-discovery, acceptance and finds the meaning of true love and peace… in herself. It’s raw, it’s suspenseful, and very sexy at times. She gets the guy, but best of all, she gets herself too.
The writing is good, not great. And the plot is strong but has holes and isn’t very solid. Only 5%, if that much of the story takes place in New York City and the borough isn’t Brooklyn or Manhattan.
I know, gasp!
The edits are plentiful. Every page has something crossed out, circled, or written in the margins. It’s as messy as the room I’m sitting in reading it. But the vibe of this story is so freakin’ me! All these years later, I’ve maintained a brand of romance that I genuinely love and that I didn’t even realize was my voice. I see so many pieces of She Vacationed in Hell in the works I’ve published since I typed the end on it. Character names I’ve unintentionally taken from this story to use in the others you all have read.
I may decide to see what added scenes I can give this baby to make it a well-rounded read. Change some names, inject well-meaning character arcs, then publish the story in serialized episodes since each chapter reads like an episode in a series. Or I may just keep it for my eyes only. I don’t know. But I have options! What I know is She Vacationed in Hell is going to require so much work to clean up before I’ll even allow it to be edited, knowing everything I know now. For now, this one will go in a box and back on the shelf until I decide. In the meantime, I’ll pull it out whenever I want to be inspired and reminded of how far I have come.
Because it isn’t only a book.
The number of stories I started and never finished before She Vacationed in Hell could fill a shelf wall-to-wall on a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. So, this one means a lot. It’s a representation of something I believed I couldn’t do and that I did. A commitment to a commitment I kept to myself. It is hard work and dedication in black words spanning 200+ pages. And it’s my very first book baby.
Would you read She Vacationed In Hell if it were a slightly revamped serialized story?
Speaking of serialized stories, have you gotten into my Kindle Vella series, Cali & Lee? It’s completed, and available to read >>here<<.