Today’s Bloganuary prompt is:

Has a book changed your life?

There’s no doubt one has, though it is probably not in the way the question was intended.

There is no book I’ve READ that has changed my life. I’ve read many thousands of books over my lifetime, and none of them stand out in that way.

But yes, a book has changed my life. The book I wrote. The novel, The Grave Blogger.

I’ve always been a writer, but until The Grave Blogger, I’d never written fiction. Well, I suppose I did when I was a young child in grade school English classes, if that was the assignment. But even in college, where I graduated with a B.S. in English Education, I didn’t write fiction. I didn’t take any creative writing courses during my time there. Once I graduated, my writing consisted of technical writing and content marketing articles, mostly. I did blog, however. I suppose that’s the closest I came to creative writing.

So in 2010, when I was going through a very rough patch in my relationship at the time, for some unknown reason, I decided to write a novel. I didn’t have a clue how to do that. The internet back then was not nearly as filled with everything one would want to know. The few things I could find on “how to write a novel” generally required money to obtain, and I had no money.

Although I’d read so very many novels, I’d never stopped to consider how they were written. I realized just how little I knew about that. So I shrugged, retreated to my home office, and wrote. I think I probably broke every possible rule there is to break while writing The Grave Blogger. But I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote.

Within a few months, I’d written a novel, under my maiden name, Donna D. Fontenot. And it was actually pretty darn good. People enjoyed reading it. Readers begged for a sequel. (I’m writing the sequel right now).

• I didn’t get rich off of it. Far from it.
• I didn’t get famous for it. Not even close.

So how did The Grave Blogger change my life?

In the subtlest, but most important way.

The Grave Blogger showed me what I’m capable of. The book revealed “me” to me. The novel opened my eyes to who I am.

I will forever see myself differently.

And for me, that is life-changing.

This post is part of the WordPress Bloganuary Challenge for 2023, where everyone participating is provided a writing prompt each day. Today’s prompt was to write about a book that changed my life.