The thing is, writing a book is so much cheaper than going back to school.

After I had my third and last baby, I somehow arrived to the decision that I was either going to back to school to get my doctorate in education, or I was going to finally publish a book. Writing a book was something I always planned on doing. Getting published was inevitable, like getting gray hair. It would happen when the time was right. Ultimately, I decided that the right time was when my daughter was four months old, which in hindsight was bananas.

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My first few attempts at writing a complete book were trash. Rather than learning how to plot and understand story structure before trying to actually create a story, I decided I would do all of it together, one Alexa Donne YouTube video at a time.

I was impatient, but not without reason. Throughout my life I had started and never finished dozens of stories, and I think there was this innate fear nagging at me that I’m not ever actually finish. That’s a fear for me that’s never actually gone away. Finishing a book— even a bad one— is hard AF. It’s like being dropped off in the middle of a forrest without a compass. (Truth be told, a compass wouldn’t help me at all if I was lost in a forest, but for sake of metaphor, this works.)

During this time I became active on Twitter and through that learned about an online writing mentorship program called Pitch Wars. Pitch Wars had a pretty impressive reputation for launching new authors by pairing them with successful writers and later connecting with literary agents during a showcase. I was determined to apply to the program. Never mind the fact that I didn’t actually have a completed book to apply with.

At the time, I was working on drafting a historical fiction novel based on my grandmother’s early life. My intentions were good, but I had no business writing a book set in the 1930s in Mexico City. Writing a book like that requires keen research and skill, both of which I possessed virtually none of. Nevertheless, I persisted because that’s the breed of stubborn and delusion I am. I ended up turning in a very shitty first draft into the 2018 PitchWars competition, and I was damn near certain that I would get it.

Reader, I did not get in.

But I did make friends, and a few mentors reached out to me about my book— if you could even call it a book— and that was just enough motivation for me to keep going.

I scrapped my historical fiction book and decided to write a rom com.

That rom com changed my life.

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