Be It Ever So Humble

I’ve been working on my first YA novel since 2016. I know… I know… Four years is a long time to work on one single novel, but I didn’t really start focusing on it until 2018. You see, this novel began as a class assignment for a YA Writing class I was taking back when I was going for my MFA in Writing. Spoiler alert: I didn’t finish because my husband and I moved, and the program wasn’t going to be free anymore. We’ve got enough student loan debt at this point, and I didn’t want to tack more onto it. I’m sure many of you can relate!

The story idea for Be It Ever So Humble came to me even earlier than 2016. In fact, it came to me when I was a teenager (I won’t say how long ago that was) vacationing at a family cabin at the Lake of the Ozarks. It was a long drive to and from our cabin without many sights along the way, so I often made up little stories in my head to pass the time. I remember seeing a house once on the drive and coming up with what would be the basic storyline of Be It Ever So Humble—a celebrity teenager forced to live on a farm, forgoing the luxurious lifestyle she was accustomed to.

At first, it seemed like a fun project for my class; then, I enjoyed writing in the main character’s voice so much that I just kept going. Of course, I stopped and started quite a few times along the way, and I edited and revised obsessively.

If there’s one good thing (for me) to come out of 2020’s new normal/stay-at-home lifestyle, it’s that I have had more time to focus on this. So after four years of stop and go, I finally have something that I’m proud of, and I’m ready to share it with whoever would like to read it.

I’ll get into more specifics soon about some of my challenges (and successes!) in formatting and prepping to launch a book with absolutely no experience and only YouTube videos and internet articles as my guide. But that’s all for future posts. In the meantime, I’m so proud of the amazing cover my husband, Wes, designed for the book and wanted to share that with you.