Week 18

It was really satisfying getting to a good place with the outline of my novel.  The chapter this week suggested building up on this and taking it further, not necessarily including it in the summary but helping it take form.  It's quite challenging for me to write it down as its been whistling around in my head for so long, five years to be precise.  I wrote the basis of the first chapter nine years ago as a short story not knowing that there was more of it to come.  Intriguingly, about a woman who, on realising what her life had become, decided that she had to stop drinking.  It seems that I wasn't ready at the time to see the mirror and look at my own life but, fortunately, five years later I took those steps and the rest of the story appeared.  It was quite a shock at first, I'd not expected there to be anymore, I certainly hadn't expected to be writing a fictional story of recovery.    Looking back now, it's a bit like my own, I spent a while denying that I needed to work the programme and that, as long as I went to meetings and was honest, it would be enough.  I learnt, like many, that the programme is there for a reason and when people say 'AA works if you work it' then that's actually the case.  On finding a sponsor and getting on with the 12 steps it definitely became a lot easier and was frustrating, although completely logical, that I hadn't done that from the beginning.  Likewise with my story, I looked to many places for the outline of the next day and the path for her life to get back on track until I realised that it would be an alignment to the 12 steps.  Not a specific alignment but following the same structure on an approximate hour by hour basis.  The idea of a day where a life can be transformed feels really exciting and I so hope it works as a story.  I suppose we will see..........