So here's something I never thought I'd do: share my first novel before it's finished. Before it's polished. Before I'm sure it's any good.
But I'm doing it anyway.
Why This Feels Insane
I've spent years writing about writing. About overcoming perfectionism. About starting before you're ready. About the importance of messy first drafts.
And then I started writing a novel... and immediately wanted to hide it until it was perfect.
The irony wasn't lost on me.
So this is me practicing what I preach. This is me being uncomfortably vulnerable. This is me showing you the messy, uncertain, “I have no idea if this is working” part of the creative process.
The Deal
I'm going to share this novel chapter by chapter as I write it. Not the final version. Not the polished, edited, “ready for publication” version. The draft version.
You’re going to see:
- Plot threads that might go nowhere
- Characters figuring out who they are
- Scenes that need work
- Writing that makes me cringe when I reread it
And hopefully, you'll also see:
- A story taking shape
- A writer learning as they go
- The messy beauty of creating something from nothing
What I'm Working On
The Quiet Season follows a schoolteacher who discovers a lost notebook filled with fragments that sound like her own thoughts. As she searches for the writer, she starts telling the truth on the page and in her life. It is a story about attention, belonging, and the slow practice of hope.
I'm about 10,000 words in. Two chapters done. Many more to go.
What I Need From You
If you read this, I'd love to know:
- Does the opening hook you?
- Do you want to know what happens next?
- What's working? What's not?
I'm not looking for line edits or grammar fixes (yet). I want to know if the story is landing. If you'd keep reading.
Be honest. Kind, but honest. This is how the work gets better.
Why Share Before It's Done?
Because waiting for perfect means never sharing at all.
Because I want to build something with readers, not just for them.
Because accountability helps me finish things.
Because showing the messy middle is just as valuable as showing the polished final product.
And because if I'm going to write about creativity, vulnerability, and doing things scared... I should probably actually do those things.
Chapter 1: The Still Life.
The kettle clicks off before dawn, the apartment still dark enough that the city’s neon looks like it’s breathing. I pour hot water over a tea bag and let the steam rise into my face. It smells like citrus and something floral the box never mentions. The cup warms my fingers. The room doesn’t.
On the table is a half-open notebook with a spine I keep meaning to fix. Last night I wrote three lines and drew a square around them as if a border could make them matter. I read them now and wince: Today I am fine. I put the cup down, close the cover, and turn the notebook so the spine faces away from me.
My phone lights up—notifications from apps I don’t open, a news alert about rain, a missed message from a group chat I’ve muted. I swipe through out of habit, answer nothing, then lay the phone face down as if I’ve done something decisive.
Outside, the first buses rumble along the main road. I live three floors up in a building with a stairwell that always smells like seaweed and laundry soap. When I open the window, the air pushes in—cool, damp, a warning. The sky is a low lid. Somewhere a roof gutter already clatters.
I dress for school in clothes that don’t wrinkle and shoes that don’t squeak. In the mirror, I practice a smile that reads as awake. It lands somewhere between polite and apologetic. I unplug the kettle, take one last sip of tea that’s gone warm, and leave.
***
The walk to the subway is short. Shopkeepers sweep their thresholds. A woman with a black umbrella pauses to point her camera at a cat curled in a cardboard box. Students in uniforms walk in groups of two and three and oceans, all talking at once. I pass the rice-cake shop where the owner nods at me like we’ve shared something meaningful. We haven’t. He just sees me at the same time every day.
On the platform I can feel the rain before I see it—air that thickens, the metal smell that comes up from the tracks. When the train arrives, bodies press in and make room. I stand near the door and watch the city turn to watercolor through the window. Buildings blur, signs smear, people hunch into their collars as if a posture could be a roof.
At school the guard waves me through with the solemnity of a ceremony. The halls are bright and echoing; everything smells faintly of disinfectant and pencil shavings. I unlock my classroom and turn on the lights. Desks in rows, a whiteboard that never quite comes clean, a plant I keep forgetting to water and then overcompensate for. I pull the blinds halfway so the morning feels less like glare and more like light.
The first class filters in with wet hair and chatter, shaking out umbrellas at the door. I write today’s question on the board: If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go—and why? It’s a sentence I could answer too quickly and not at all.
They write for five minutes. The room goes soft with the scratch of pens. I circle between desks, pretending to read, actually noticing hands—bitten nails, pen grips, the way some students hover before their words land.
“Teacher,” Meena says, tapping her pencil against her essay. “Can I go to the future?”
“Of course,” I say. “So long as you tell us why.”
She grins, relieved, as if I’ve granted something larger.
Midway through second period the rain begins for real. It comes slow at first, like someone testing a faucet, then hard enough that the sound fills every pause. Students swivel to look. One presses her forehead to the glass.
“It’s lucky,” I say. “First rain of the month.”
“It rained last week,” someone mutters.
“Then it’s lucky again,” I say, and a few laugh like the bargain might hold.
We read a short story about a boy who runs away and doesn’t. The class debates whether staying is an action or a failure. I don’t say anything, because my answer keeps changing depending on the year, the apartment, the person I am when I unlock the door.
Between periods, I stack graded papers and tuck loose hair behind my ears. A colleague leans in the doorway with a mug that says WORLD’S COOLEST AUNT.
“You’re always so calm,” she says. “How do you do it?”
“Tea,” I say, raising an invisible cup.
She laughs and tells me about her niece’s birthday party, the chaos and the frosting. After she leaves, I look at my reflection in the dark window—my mouth still set in the careful line it takes all day to hold. Calm is a surface. You can skate on it, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the lake.
By lunch, the rain has found every angle. The courtyard drains can’t keep up. Students run from one awning to the next, shrieking, delighted and bothered in equal measure. I sit with a tray that holds rice, seaweed soup, kimchi, and a small orange whose skin peels away in one generous ribbon. Across the room, the staff TV shows a replay of yesterday’s baseball game with the sound off. People nod at the good parts like they remember exactly how they felt when it actually happened.
Back in the classroom, I grade the morning’s responses. I would go to the moon because no one knows me there. I would go to my grandmother’s house because it smells like warm towels. I would go nowhere because here is fine.
Here is fine. I draw a check mark and resist the urge to write, Is it?
At the bottom of the stack is a paper without a name. The handwriting is small and careful.
I would go to the place I promised I would go when I was thirteen and thought the world would wait for me. I don’t know where that is anymore. Maybe a quiet city where the trains are on time. Maybe any place I could hear rain and not feel sad.
I pause, then write, Tell me more, as if I can be the kind of person who will keep asking.
The last period ends with a scatter of chairs and unzipped backpacks. Students bow and wave and fold themselves back into their afternoon lives. I stay to straighten the rows, to erase the board, to put the plant by the window as if more light could undo my neglect.
“Go home,” the guard will say if he catches me here after five. I will nod and pretend that’s my plan.
I sweep chalk dust into my palm and carry it to the trash. A stray worksheet on the floor brushes my ankle, and when I bend to pick it up I see it’s not a worksheet at all but a small notebook, clothbound, the kind sold near the stationery store with the pastel pens. The cover is navy, softened at the corners. A strip of white tape along the spine is blank, as if it once named and forgot itself.
I shouldn’t open it. That’s the first feeling. Then the second: I am alone in this room, and maybe rules can be kind.
The first page is a doodle of a window with rain drawn as diagonal lines. Beneath it: July. I am learning how to wait without hating the waiting. The next page is a list—things that mean morning—steam, bus brakes, the smell of sesame oil from downstairs. Another page: three lines about a cat that lives under a bakery awning and refuses all gifts but attention.
Most entries are fragments. Some are tiny letters addressed to no one. Some are practice sentences like the ones I assign: I remember the summer I grew taller than my mother’s patience. If I could carry a season in my pocket, it would be late September when the air tells the truth.
I sit in my chair and read as the rain threads the gutters and thickens the room’s edges. The notebook is not a diary so much as a place to locate a voice. It is tender, occasionally clumsy, and full of the kind of hope I don’t trust unless it’s written by hand.
Halfway through, a page is dog-eared. I unfold it and find a longer paragraph.
Sometimes I think growing up is just learning to make a home in whatever you have left. I’m trying to be patient. I’m trying to notice small things. This morning on the subway a woman gave her seat to a boy who pretended not to be surprised. He said thank you so quietly I almost missed it.
The last pages are lighter, written with a pen that was running out of ink. The handwriting fades, grows small, then brave again. Near the back, there’s a line that makes me hold my breath.
I just want to believe things get better.
I read it twice, then again, as if repetition could warm it.
I look around the classroom like the author might still be here, laughing at how seriously I’m taking their sentence. The room is empty except for me and the soft tap of rain on the air unit and the plant that looks more hopeful than it did this morning. I flip the notebook over, searching for a name. Nothing. The white tape on the spine is clean as a bandage.
If I leave it here, it might wander to lost-and-found and then to the bin. If I carry it home, I am keeping something that isn’t mine. If I announce it, a dozen students will claim it, and the one who wrote that line will never admit it was theirs.
I slip the notebook into my bag without deciding to. The zipper sounds loud in the empty room.
On my way out, the hallways are a string of bright puddles, students pressing posters flat against the wall with strips of green tape. A teacher waves and asks if I’ve finished the new attendance form that keeps failing to save. I say I’ll do it tonight after dinner and immediately forgive myself for the lie.
At the gate, the guard in his navy cap raises a hand. “Go home,” he says. “Rain too strong.”
“I’m going,” I say. “I promise.”
Outside the awning, the rain is thick enough to blur the buildings into each other. Crossing the street feels like wading into a lake. I hold my umbrella against the wind and make myself small. People move in cautious diagonals. A boy in sneakers sloshes through a puddle the size of a table and laughs like he’s proven something.
The subway air is warmer, heavy with wet wool and shampoo. I stand, one hand on the rail, my bag pressed to my side as if its new weight could shift. The window is a gray sheet. In the reflection, my face looks softer than it did this morning, not from peace but from a kind of permission I can’t name.
At home, I leave my shoes by the door and line them with a towel. The apartment smells like the tea I drank before sunrise and the rain I carried in on my sleeves. I set the notebook on the table and open the window a little, enough to hear the rain hit the metal roof of the next building over.
I make another cup of tea. The kettle vibrates as it heats, a small hum that lives in the bones. I don’t turn on any lights. The city provides its own.
The notebook lies open to the last page with writing. I touch the margin with the back of my finger, as if the paper might be warm.
I just want to believe things get better.
It’s a sentence I could have written at twenty or yesterday. It lands between my ribs and stays.
Outside, a bus sighs at a stop and pulls away. A siren begins far off and then gives up. The rain has settled into a steady pattern, the kind that could last all night. The sound is both hollow and full, like a drum struck with an open hand.
I pick up my own notebook—the one with the mended spine—and open to a new page. The first line comes slow, like stepping onto a moving walkway.
This morning I told my students that the first rain is lucky.
I wait. The second line arrives, easier:
Maybe the second is too.
I write until the tea goes cold. I write until the window fogs near the latch. I write until the rain has a voice and then two. When I stop, I close the notebook and reach for the other one—the student’s—and place it on top of mine, a gentle stack.
“Okay,” I say to the empty room, to the plant, to the water moving through the pipes and gutters, finding every path it can. “Okay.”
Somewhere in the building, a neighbor laughs at something I cannot hear. A motorcycle grumbles its way down the alley. The rain keeps going, sure of itself in a way I am not, and I let it speak for now.
I turn off my phone without checking it and sit in the dim. The city breathes. The notebooks rest. The night opens like a door.
And for the first time in a long time, I don’t tell myself I’m fine. I am something else. I am here.
Also I created this basic tool for writers who procrastinate because of perfectionism. Try out this tool here, and let me know if it helps.