{"id":5421,"date":"2013-12-12T20:26:51","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T02:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=5421"},"modified":"2025-08-24T11:28:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:28:22","slug":"one-day-i-started-writing-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/one-day-i-started-writing-a-book\/","title":{"rendered":"One day I started writing a book."},"content":{"rendered":"

That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby<\/a> kept poking at me.<\/p>\n

Whatcha workin\u2019 on?<\/em><\/p>\n

NOTHING! I\u2019M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I\u2019LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n

So \u2026 what\u2019s in your idea folder?<\/em><\/p>\n

OH, FINE. Here\u2019s a list. I don\u2019t know what to do with ANY of this stuff.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tell me about THIS one. It seems most fully developed.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s just sketches. I have no idea what to do with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hmm. *reads* So, um, why does X character do Y thing?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that was pretty much all it took to start dumping in email at her and then I started sketching and next thing I knew, it was November 30 (end of NaNoWriMo<\/a>) (no, I didn\u2019t have any intention of doing NaNo) (no, I didn\u2019t do it FOR NaNo), and I only had one scene to finish.<\/p>\n

It is 95,000 words long. It has no title. It has no playlist. It has no cover. It has no release date.<\/p>\n

But here I am telling you about it because, well \u2026 You know that scene in The Proviso<\/em><\/a> where Giselle\u2019s looking at the little blue lines on the pee stick and getting a weird feeling in her stomach?<\/p>\n

Yeah, that.<\/p>\n

But what it does<\/em> have is a rough blurb and excerpts I\u2019ve been posting on Facebook, but I\u2019d rather not punish non-Facebook fans by doing that. So \u2026 here\u2019s me naked.<\/p>\n

So to speak.<\/p>\n

Nineteen-year-old fresh-faced Mormon missionary \u00c9tienne Dunham LaMontagne, engineer, inventor, was always easy to love, but he was a nightmare to live with\u2014his brilliance, pirate-king beauty, and penchant for high drama exhausted everybody who loved him. There was only one girl who could do it\u2014seventeen-year-old budding green architect Mi-Kyung Tess Chun, with her visionary genius, flamboyant beauty, and penchant for bringing on the crazy.<\/p>\n

Until she couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Twenty years and five children later, her genius is gone, ground fine as talc under the unrelenting heel of life as a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, and \u00c9tienne\u2019s personal handler. It was exhausting. And she had exactly five groundbreaking buildings to her name\u2014built with \u00c9tienne when she was young and stupid in love and bringing the crazy.<\/p>\n

And \u00c9tienne\u2014well, he hadn\u2019t wanted a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, or<\/i> personal handler. He wanted the visionary architect and voracious lover he\u2019d married who asked him to build things he had no idea how to build to power her buildings. He resented that somewhere along the way, she had allowed her vision to crumble in favor of dusting miniblinds and baseboards.<\/p>\n

They part company bitterly, all that love and genius and drama wrapped up in cold divorce papers, their complaints unintelligible to the other.<\/p>\n

Five years later, \u00c9tienne is utterly humbled after having built Whittaker House<\/a>\u2014a disaster of a building\u2014with an average architect. The shame of it sent him traipsing around the world with his oldest\u2014and very angry\u2014son. Along the way, he\u2019s learned a thing or two about functioning in the world on its terms instead of his. When his youngest daughter begs him to come home to check on his oldest daughter, he does so reluctantly, only to find himself cleaning up the mess her life has become\u2014something he couldn\u2019t have done five years before.<\/p>\n

Tess\u2019s vision has returned and she is again on top of green energy architecture, her flamboyance tempered but her vision strengthened, broadened, lengthened with time, age, and maturity. But she\u2019s still a mother, and her now-adult children have problems of their own\u2014serious problems. Her oldest son has been missing for five years. One of her low-maintenance children has severe antepartum psychosis. Her youngest daughter dropped out of high school.<\/p>\n

Tess was exhausted being \u00c9tienne\u2019s keeper, but once free of her, he\u2019s learned how to be a normal human being.<\/p>\n

\u00c9tienne resented Tess for letting her vision disappear, but once free of him, her vision has returned.<\/p>\n

But even separated by distance and time, they never stopped loving each other. It\u2019s just that sometimes \u2026 love isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

Until it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did I mention it\u2019s a sobfest?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013. I haven\u2019t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby kept poking at me. Whatcha workin\u2019 on? NOTHING! I\u2019M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I\u2019LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!! So \u2026 what\u2019s in your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[318,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tales-of-dunham","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5421"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18507,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421\/revisions\/18507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}