As promised, I’m announcing the title of my book in this post and I can’t wait to hear what you think of it. Unlike other books I’ve written, the title came to me first and the characters and story second and third. The title made me laugh at myself for even thinking it, but I’ve had some time, a few years, to get used to it and find the courage to not only write this book, but do it publicly, in front of anyone who wants to read along. My book to your eyes, week by week. I can’t promise you’ll love the story or even like it, but I can promise to try and make this journey together interesting, fun and encouraging to all the women out there who want to write but are scared to start.

I just want to say from the start that although I was a professional writer for many years, I’ve never tried to have any of the five novels I’ve written published. The time was never right, and I always told myself that those five stories were like my apprenticeship in fiction writing. It’s okay to keep writing until you choose a story to put out there. Every book has its time and not every book is for sharing.

The name of my book is The Naked Ladies Writing Group. Yes, it has the word naked in the title, but no it isn’t all about being nude, instead it is about being your most bare, honest and real self in your writing practice and you’ll see as the story unfolds that the characters aren’t all at the same stage of willingness to be open. It’s going to be about a group of women, each one wanting to write, each one with her own style, abilities and obstacles. I haven’t yet definitely decided how many women will be in the group, and my job now is to make my final decision about each of their names, attribute personalities to them and set up their lives. I like to do this when I write fiction, and then use it as a kind of primary source for writing the story.

Today I’m looking at lists of baby names, lists of surnames, lists of people in the online phone books, and writing down the ones that leap out at me. As I’m writing the first draft I like to have these lists so that as I write, even if there’s an incidental character who needs a name I can just look at my list and choose one. This impacts the flow of my writing minimally. Names are important to me and I’ve even changed a characters name halfway through a book, which leads to painful time editing that day!

The characters and events in my book will be completely fictional, created in my imagination. The story belongs to me, each blog post belongs to me. As I write the story in my blog posts, I will be copying and pasting each entry into a Word file, building up the story in one place to edit later. Do you like the name I’ve chosen for my book? Let me know in a comment. Find me on Instagram at RachelGraceWrites and say hi.