First Chapter Done!

You all should be very proud of me. But then again, who cares what you all think of me! (Just kidding!) I am very proud of me. I have been working right ahead all week and in exactly one week I have my first chapter finished! Okay, it’s really a rough draft of my first chapter but it’s done and I’m going right ahead and writing every chapter this way and once I’m all done then I’ll come back and I’ll revise and rewrite. I was talking to one of my best friends about this today and I was telling her that even though the main character may seem auto-biographical she really isn’t. She can really be any one of my friends. She can be any one of us or any unmarried Latina woman in her thirties. I like my main character and that’s important. She’s a cool hip chick.

This is a very interesting week. First of all, The Houston Chronicle bought La Voz de Houston. That’s historical! A major daily English newspaper bought a small Spanish weekly. Read the story in today’s Chronicle by my fabulous writer friend Jenalia Moreno. If you don’t have a Chronicle handy look click here, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2929301.

This is also an interesting week. It was ten years ago this week that I had my first week of freedom when I left the Chronicle the first time. And six years ago this week I was back at the Chronicle when I returned. I’ve been here six years! That’s the longest time I’ve spent in any job now. The second longest were the four and a half years at the Daily Cougar when I was in school. In between there I bounced back and forth between substitute teaching (I really thought I wanted to become a teacher) and at UH again as a staff position. So this week is an anniversary of sorts.

For those of you who have never read this before in my old blog, working at the Daily Cougar as a student was my “butterfly effect.” That was the point in my life when I had two roads in front of me and which one did I take? The one less traveled or the one most traveled? It’s hard to say. Not everyone likes to sell advertising and not everyone wants to be a journalist either. What would have happened if I’d remained a journalism major and written for The Daily Cougar instead of going into advertising? Would I still be a journalist? Would I have left the Chronicle the first time? We’ll never know! I did this and this is where I am. Life is funny.