This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind?

I’ve got two manuscripts that are in various stages of being edited, by me. One of them will come out in 2019, the other in 2020. The one that is coming out next year is almost ready. The one with another two years needs a lot of work, and I finally am starting to be able to see that. I’ve finally seen the limitations of “good enough” and am working on “better”. I’ve long abandoned the idea of “perfect” thankfully.

These two books seem necessary right now for me. This urgency keeps me focused on the edits, focused on getting it right. I want them to be right, to be what they need to be, what I need them to be, what my readers need them to be. I’m in the phase where the audience isn’t just me; I’m writing for an audience that I’m imagining will want to read these books.

I have a call out for essay proposals for another book that I’m editing, about affect and alt-ac jobs. Those are due at the end of next month, and then the whole manuscript will hopefully be done sometime next summer. I’m really looking forward to editing this book because the topic is near and dear to my heart, but also the preliminary response to my call has been so positive.

And then, I put out an idea for writing about growing up in the West Island, about going to a French university, about basically being myself, and someone is interested and excited and wants to do it. I am floored that this is going to happen. It’s a book I’ve wanted to write in one form or another since I left Sherbrooke. And now I get to.

I am also going to get to write the YA book I had always wanted to read when I was a kid, a book about a swimmer, but now not just any swimmer but a swimmer with ADHD, a teen girl who is a swimmer who discovers she has ADHD. Maybe it isn’t just the book I wanted to read, but the life I wish I could have had. I want to write the book for all the girls out there who don’t see themselves in fiction, in pages, in stories.

I joked with my husband that I am going to write and publish ten books in ten years in my 40s. My kids today were amazed to hear that people paid me for my writing, that I was writing not one, not two, but four books, and editing another. I didn’t know you were THAT good, mom. My son looks at it and laments that he’ll never be able to write a book. Writing is literally painful to him, where his ideas move faster than his hand can write them, faster than even his mouth can speak them and sometimes it sounds like he has a stutter but it is just him trying to say all the words that he has in his head.

This is my hyperfocus right now, finally, turned back towards where I always wanted it to be, in words, in writing. I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember. I know that I’ve been a writer for a while, but now I feel like I’ve taken it to the next level – becoming an author.