I know that osmosis is a thing, it's just not the thing I wish it was.

In my ideal world, once I had an idea and a direction for a story it would magically transfer itself from my brain onto a computer screen and make total sense.

(My ideal world is a super cool place filled with that really beautiful leather Marc Jacobs uses to make his purses, unlimited refreshing iced beverages in cups with lids & straws, and Harry Styles.) 

(What else could you need? A nice bag, a lemonade spritzer, and a cute tall boy with a British accent and a manbun - life is good, my friends.)

But I digress. 

You have an idea for a story, you plan it out, you name your characters and figure out their lives and their motivations and their backstories... And then what? I had no idea.

You just start writing? You wait for inspiration to strike and jot things down quickly before you forget, even if you're in the worst possible situation to easily acquire a pen and paper? Like, say, in the shower? Pens, paper, showers, wet hands - it's not good, trust me.

But when that voice starts talking, that inner monologue, the one that seems to have your characters on lock and knows exactly how a scene should go when you were previously stuck on one sentence for three days - when that voice starts talking I've learned to listen or forever regret completely forgetting the breakthroughs I never wrote down.

So in lieu of some sort of Dr. Seuss-type invention of a dictaphone/transcriber/mind-reader with three hundred knobs and a few twisty-turny bobbles and bells, more often than not I find myself curling up with a lined notebook and pen, taking it back old school style while I try to get my handwriting to keep up with my brain.

I can't force it, I've never been able to, and I can identify every piece I've ever written where I felt like I was phoning it in. It's a necessary evil at times, when you're on a deadline or just out of ideas, but this was different. 

If you are writing for yourself, because you must, because you have so many ideas that there isn't room in your brain for one more thing until you let some of them out, the urgency is enough to make you crazy. Why can't they just exit nicely and form single file lines in my Documents folder? Whyyyyy?

I think it's because the story isn't complete until you go through the process - and I both hate and love the process. Writing isn't just having ideas and never changing them, thinking about them, editing them, or staring at them until you see something there that makes sense. It's all of those things in a continuous loop until you start on the next project.

So I go back to my notebook and my pen, because that is the beginning. That is home.

Just like riding a bike, except not at all and also with less bikes.

I haven't blogged regularly in about 4 years, because the last year or so of Clever Girl Goes Blog was a laughable effort of about ten posts that mainly said something along the lines of "HOLY CRAP I HAVE A CHILD" and "PAJAMAS ARE THE NEW COUTURE."

Turns out, that break was great preparation for writing a book, because writing a book is nothing like writing a blog. QUELLE SURPRISE.

No, seriously.  It's not.

I thought that all of my years of blogging would be the muscle I'd fall back on when I started my book, but unforch, that wasn't the case.  Because in the world of writing we're talking about apples and oranges and maybe even like pears or something, and while I'm not an expert on orchards, I know that these are all different fruits.

(This suddenly took a weird turn from a bike metaphor to a grocery store analogy but just go with it.)

Writing a blog is about telling a story in a concise, one-page-ish format that even someone brand-new to your site could mostly understand without having to sift through your archives for a ton of backstory.

Writing a book is all about elaboration. Developing your characters, the setting, the story arc - all of these elements take planning and drafting. I never wrote a blog post with more than a vague idea or a specific isolated incident in mind, and now I had to keep track of multiple fictional characters and an event timeline for each sub-plot.

So I did something that I hadn't done since I was forced to in high school - I sat down and wrote outlines. I scrapped those and wrote new ones, and did it again and again until I had a workable storyline.

(Then I cussed a little, because I hate when things I'm decidedly against turn out to be necessary and functional.)

And then I looked at everything and thought to myself  "You know where it's going - now you have to make it go there."

Guess who's back, back again.

If you guessed ME, you'd be right.  It's good to be here, thank you for coming.

I know, I know, it's been a long time, radio silence and all, and for that I apologize.  

If you don't know me, or aren't sure how you got here, let's get acquainted. 

Hi, I'm Tia, this is my website.  I used to write a blog, I don't anymore because of many reasons which I don't have time to list and also you don't care but MAINLY because I don't have time since I WROTE A BOOK INSTEAD.

Maybe some of you knew me back in the old Clever Girl Goes Blog glory days, when all I worried about was my hair and whether or not the infamous Hubs would ever stop snoring.

(I mean, in reality we all know that I worried about a lot more stuff because HI NEUROTIC but let's just go with it.)

(Also, can we get a round of applause for the long-suffering Hubs? He's still hangin' in like a champ. And still snoring HIII HUBS <3)

Anyway.

As long as I can remember, the only thing I've ever wanted to be was a writer. I'm not sure if I always knew what that even meant, or how a person was supposed to make a living doing it, but I wanted it regardless.

So I wrote things, and some of them were good, and some not so good, and some I even published on the internet. (Both the good and the not so good, in case you were wondering, I'm nothing if not consistently inconsistent.) And a few people liked it.

If I'm being very honest, writing is the only thing that makes sense to me. It's my one constant in a never-ending cycle of hobbies, life changes, challenges, and obligations. But even though for me it was a basic need, it was largely still just a dream.

Until today.

Today is a bucket list day, because today my debut novel Hey Sunshine is available for preorder on Amazon. It will be officially available on all platforms on April 28th.

So not only is today a bucket list day, but it's also a day that proves to me that I can dream, and I can do, because I did.