J. Lewis Simmons
My parents named me after the famed writer C.S. Lewis who always went by Jack. As far back as I can remember I loved writing. Being able to create your own world with words has always been a treasure for me. Like most kids I wrote poetry short stories. No longer than a page of course, but the imagination was there. Now most people think that I must excell in English. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Creative writing is my area of joy, most certainly not the mechanics of the English language. To me the gears get in the way of insperation.
Preordained
It was in the winter of 2007 that I began to call my self a writer. In my english class we need to write a story. The only requirement was that it needed to be alagorical. I took this assignment as a challenge. My goal was to write a 50,000 word story, 50k words being the minimum to be called a novel. I was really looking forward to turning in a book to my teacher.
So I set out to do the unthinkable: somehow manage to write 50,000 words over winter break (two weeks). Which translates roughly into 3600 words every day. Well I figured out that I could write 500 words in thirty minutes. However, this was speed typing, no thinking what so ever. After the first few days I got it down to a science. I would spend thirty minutes writing, and thirty think about what I'm going to write next. Most nights I was up till four in the morning. Sometimes I wouldn't even go to bed.
Time passed and I saw the word count go from 1,000 words to 10,000. It wasn't long before I had passed the Novella point, which is 17,500 words. I would really push my self at every turn. I remember telling my family that the hardest part is that I have to stop and think up stuff. If I just didn't have to do that then I could have it done in no time.
It was Christmas eve morning, and I just got to bed, exausted from writing all night. My room was a mess, and Christmas was the furthest thing from my mind. When I fell asleep, which was the moment my head hit my pillow, I never slept so deeply in my entire life. I blinked, and it was dark oustide. I felt like I just got to bed, and I remember my dad waking me up to to see if I wanted to go to church. That was a family tradition that we never lossed, going to church on Christmas eve.
It was the day before school starts up again, and I had 47,000 words, just a few hours short of a complete novel. Later I descovered that the SFWA consider 40,000 words to be a novel. So I'm quite satisfied with my acomplishment.
To this day the book remaines uneditied and in it's first draft. I plan on returning to it soon and reworking the entire book. I believe that once it's completed it should be closer to 100,000 words. Currently there is a lot left unexplained. Oh, I almost forgot, I titled it Preordained.
Other Works
In October of 2008, I started writing another book, more out of nastalgia than anything else. I have fond memories of writing my last book. I started with chapter two, because I have a hard time of making a book sounding good right off the bat, so If I start later than I can write the begining better with the knowlege of what's going to happen. So this book is about a famous movie star that gets sucked into another world, he ends up getting trapped and will do anything to get back home. It was a great idea, but my nastalgia soon ran out and I stopped writing about two weeks later.
The key concept here of someone getting stuck in another world, is something that I have been mulling over for a long time, since I finished Preordained. This core concept plays part of the current book that I am writing. It's currently untitled and will remain so until I finish a good portion of the book. This novel, is the first one that I am writing to get published. For a while I was under the impresion that getting a book published was nearly impossable, but after reading of the sucsess stories of J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and Christopher Paolini, I became convinced that anyone could get their book published as long as they keep sending it to agents.