Tuesday, March 20, 2012

By C. Michelle Jefferies
photo from jungsumartialarts.com

Thanks for the Welcome! I am so excited to be here.


My name is C. Michelle Jefferies. I’m the mother of seven, mostly boys, and 8 chickens. We live in rural southeast Utah where it’s not odd to see two of our neighbors saddling their
horses in the middle of the road to chase some errant cows. Maybe that is why I
am thinking of writing a futuristic western-y style story, maybe I’m insane and
think that it’ll be a challenge. I am a red belt in Tang Soo Do a Korean style od Karate. I'm half way to black belt. I love to go thrift store shopping and collect bags that I never use, and teapots cups and saucers. I am learning to knit and also love to sew when I have uninterupted time which is never.



I love to write and for a long time thought I wrote science fiction which was my first love. Now I find that I actually write Suspense style with some futuristic influences that some people call “Tech Suspense”. I also love the gritty-ness of Urban Fantasy, not necessarily the romance side. While I have a huge list of characters demanding that I tell their suspense story, I
dabble here and there in Urban Fantasy, YA scifi, and Middle Grade non fiction. I’m
going to need a lot of pseudo-names if I get all of these published eventually.


I decided I wanted to write somewhere between 5th grade and middle school. My friends and I loved to create and act out stories and some of them were good enough that we started to write them down. From then on, the love of writing has never left me. In high school I met a friend who had written a whole novel and typed it out. That was back before everyone had computers and printers. She challenged me to write a whole book and chucking my sanity aside, I accepted. That hand written 198 page book took me a year to write and was finished just before the end of my Junior year.


I revised that book, again by hand, after I graduated from high school but quickly put it on a back burner when I met my future husband, attended college, married, and started a family. While I never forgot about my story I honestly had no time to do anything about it. While I never attempted anything epic in those years, I was constantly telling my kids stories and
wishing I had a way to record them and transcribe them onto paper.


After my 5th child was born a friend lent me Harry Potter books #4 and 5. I love to read and quickly fell in love with the series. After finishing #5 I was one of those who were eagerly awaiting the arrival of #6. One evening as I was bored, having read everything in my house I decided to pull out the small bag of writing I had saved from back when and give it a read. About fifteen minutes into it I decided that those ideas I’d had so long ago were actually pretty
decent and I sat down at my ancient computer opened a word document and started
to re-write one of them.

The next year I wrote with a happy abandon and cranked out quite a few rough drafts. I want to empathize ROUGH. While I may have learned grammar and other things in high school I had forgotten or been taught wrong on most of them. About this time I met a neighbor who also turned out to be a writer. Between the two of us we actively searched out and found resources such as ANWA and LDStorymakers, and AI.


The next many years I re-learned almost everything, revised many manuscripts, and intimately experienced the try/fail cycle myself. Each year has been a learning process and with the help of many, many friends who have taken time out of their busy schedules and hours of help that they could have been paid for. I have learned how to be a real writer. You know the saying that you need to do something so many times before getting it right? Yeah, I have written over a million words in the last seven years.


I am now at the point where I am receiving full requests, winning contests and feeling like those years of hard work are about to pay off.


To those friends and acquaintances who have been there with me or have been my personal cheerleaders I thank you. This would not have been possible without you. I hope to have
good news soon.

2 comments:

James C Duckett said...

What a great bio! Congrats on the first million words. I hear that is the initial word count to shoot for before you start figuring out how this is all done.

Donna K. Weaver said...

Awesome to learn about you!

I love SciFi or even futurist things. And I'm a black belt.