The Very Beginning…

I was pregnant with our son when I began writing Zo’s Quest.

The laptop had it’s own table on my belly kind of pregnant.

It was the end of 2015, and we were given scholarships for our girls to attend a local daycare for 2.5 hours, 4 days a week.

This was the first taste of independence I’d had in years!

(If you’re a SAHM/SAHD, you know what I’m talking about.)

After the girls were dropped off, I’d lean back into the 1980’s brown, orange and green wool-threaded sofa we proudly found at the Goodwill, and begin tap-tapping on my husband’s MacBook (which even then was older than our eldest by 2 years!). That’s where it started.

The backstory took the longest to write. Ironically, I’ve since cut about 95% of it from the book. I’ve considered using it for a prequel one day, but maybe all the time I put into it was just for me to get my bearings…

Isn’t that like life? Our formative years are almost entirely lost to time.

I don’t remember what it was like taking my first steps, or the first taste I had of food, or whether or not I sucked a pacifier or my thumb — or maybe I preferred a blanket? I have no idea what caused my first sensation of fear, nor my first impression of love. I couldn’t even tell you what would make me laugh or cry…

But those things, those actions and reactions, those forgotten fragments made the cement that founded me.

And like every other foundation, it’s buried. I can’t see it.

I don’t know much about it, but I know I can stand on it.

All the time I spent, my stomach burning beneath the overheating battery of an out-of-date MacBook, fixated on the blinking blip as I contemplated the best, next word, only to be jolted into reality in time to catch the computer because our unborn son felt the urge to kick.

It was my first taste of freedom and (after years of navigating through one upended situation to another, then marrying and moving across the country and starting my career, to move again to focus on bringing life into existence and all that that contains) for the very first time, I got to sit and I find myself… in creating the telling of another.

After all of it, the beginning did not make my final edit, and I am at peace. Zo’s Quest could not have come about without that season.

It is written. It felt like it took forever to write out, and I must have gone back over it hundreds of times, but aside from this blog it’s very unlikely you would ever know about it. You may catch a glimpse here and there — and if I wrote it well enough, you’ll know it’s solid — but the very beginning is not how this story begins.

Zo’s Quest begins at the crossroad of a difficult past and an uncertain future...