Introducing: Drops of the Ocean

It’s been a while since I’ve offered an update. I’m sorry for that! After the PNWA conference last fall, I was offered a full-time substitute position at Douglas High School as the librarian. It was a great gig, and I loved getting to see all my kiddos from my long-term Algebra sub job two years ago, but working full time slowed me down in terms of writing.

However, one of the big perks of working in the school system is summer break, and last week I finally put the final scene together of my current work in progress. It felt so good to write “The End” and mean it. I’ve only finished a draft of one previous manuscript, and that was full of holes, nonsensical time skips, characters changing personality midway through, and breaks in the action where I literally wrote “[come back to this later].” Plus one notable scene where I was so fed up that the character literally turned to another character and said, “The writer hates this, so let’s skip to the part where we make up.”

Yeah, I don’t really consider that a complete draft. “Rough” doesn’t begin to cover it.

So this time, I made sure to go back and do a round of edits as I was working through the final battle scene. I didn’t write “The End” until every word of it at least made sense. No gaping holes. And it feels amazing. It feels surreal. There’s still work to do, but I have something that I can hold up and show to agents and editors with pride. That’s a huge step.

This project has been “Untitled” for 20 months. But as I was compiling it into a word document so I could send it to my mom and best friend to read, it felt like it needed a title. I’d expected something to come to me as I was writing. Something to stand out that just seemed perfect. That’s happened with a lot of my works-in-progress. As I develop the story, the title starts to seem obvious. But not with this one. I wanted something literary, so I started browsing through allegories online. The Odyssey caught my attention because of the journey aspect, and then I started thinking about the sea. I wound up on a list of quotes about the ocean, and then I saw this:

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

―Mahatma Gandhi

This novel is about a lot of things. It’s about love, and the ideas we have about what love should look like versus what it looks like it reality. It’s about friendship and mistakes, about forgiveness and loyalty, about individual strength and group strength. It’s about understanding and culture, about holding out a hand to your neighbors in the next town over. It’s about distance and longing and loss and pain, about connection and satisfaction and victory and joy. But most of all, it’s about humanity. It’s about the complex worlds inside us all, about how our paths twist and turn, about how one malicious person can cause immense strife amongst people who all, inherently, want the same thing: a better world. It’s about victory over ignorance, about seeing people for who their actions prove them to be, rather than anything we can observe from a distance.

So this quote seemed perfect. It’s always possible that a publisher will want to change the title, but for now I’d like to introduce you to my first complete novel: Drops of the Ocean.