Writing a novel

My name is Ardin Lalui. I'm twenty-seven. I wrote most of Ramona in three months. I was inspired after I broke up with my wife in August 2007. I felt very guilty about the break up, we had only been married for two years and she had a daughter. I know now that it was for the best and was what we both wanted, but at the time I felt real bad about it. In my intense guilt I wrote about Art, a guy who kills a girl called Martha, and then finds out that nobody in the world gives a God damn. Not even Martha cares. And that just drives Art crazy. He's wracked with guilt, and the book follows his journey from Mexico to California and then across the US through small towns as he tries to leave behind the memory of what he did. His journey was pretty much the same as my own, I've been traveling ever since I broke up with my wife. His resolution was my resolution. 

So the book just poured out of me. I had about 40,000 words within three months. This first draft didn't have an ending because I didn't have an ending for myself and my own guilt. I travelled in the Czech Republic, Spain, South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia before I was finally ready for Art to finish his journey. That took about a year. So very recently I completed my second draft of Ramona, complete with the ending. The final draft is now 52,500 words in length, which I found out qualifies it as full length, adult fiction. 

So that's it. Getting over the break up and getting that novel out were the same journey for me. It feels great to have written it and I'm already working on my next book but this blog is going to follow Art's next journey. That is, the journey from word document on my laptop to published novel on the New York Times best seller list. I hope you follow the journey with me.