My day begins somewhere from six-thirty to seven am. I wake up and do all the small, morning things. I make my bed, wash my face, dress, and read. I wake up early because I find that morning is one of the most inspiring times to me, and I like to sit alone in the morning quiet, reading my Bible and watching the trees dance outside. Thinking. Thinking is more than half the work of the author.
For as long as I can remember, I have been a storyteller. At age two my stuffed animals were my characters, then I paced my bedroom telling stories aloud. I received a handheld recorder one year for Christmas and talked to it for hours, filling it with thrilling tales of my seven-year-old invention. Later my parents sat patiently listening as I told my stories to them, typing my words down on our family computer.
Somewhere an hour or so into my morning quiet time the rest of my family awakes. I have five younger siblings and two wonderful parents who have home schooled all of us from the beginning. There is the usual lovely chaos of breakfast and talk and teasing and laughter, and then the work of the day begins. Some mornings I will go to my Taekwondo class in town, in the summers I sit down with my five-year-old sister and read to her and teach her to read and write. During the school year, when I don’t have a Taekwondo class, I retreat to my room with my schoolwork and busy myself with Latin and math and science and the typing of essays. I enjoy the essays best; they’re very different from fiction writing, but some of my skills in that area leak over, and I’m a very fast typer. I’ve been typing for years now, and my average is seven hundred words in half an hour.
I don’t remember when I first started typing out words on my own, but it wasn’t early. Despite my love of words, I was not an early reader or a very good speller. But one day I must have had the realization that just as one did not have to know all the words in the world to read a story, one did not have to know how to spell all of those words to write one. My grammar was horrid, my spelling terrible, my imagination vivid - bursting with colors only I could see. My early stories had no line breaks or quotation marks. But I didn’t care for what they looked like, only what they meant. Gently, over time, my parents corrected mistakes and I picked up on the ‘rules’ from the books I read.
By lunchtime, I’ve usually finished my morning activities whether that is my school work for the day or lessons with my little sister. So I leave my room and eat lunch and talk with the rest of my family.
After lunch, it’s time for the ‘authorly’ things. Writing, marketing, publication.
It was somewhere around the age of nine, I think, that I began to put some thought into publication. I never quite decided that I wanted to be an author, it just seemed to be the most natural, next thing to do. It seemed that I had always wanted to be one. Slowly, my answer to that common question changed from ‘I want to be an author when I grow up’ to ‘I want to be an author soon’.
Soon is a strange word. It can mean anything from five minutes to five years, and my impatient, twelve-year-old self, knew that all too well from my parents answers to questions.
“Are we going to go to the park?”
“Soon.”
Sometimes ‘soon’ never comes.
I was determined that my 'soon' would not be the slippery kind that slid further and further and then melted away - like an ice cube on the kitchen floor. I needed to form out steps to my destination, I needed to finish one of my many beginnings at a story.
My afternoons are always different. If I’m working on a draft, I write the required words for that day, or edit the required scenes, or read through Beta Readers feedback, depending on what stage I’m at. Sometimes I just sit and stare into space, trying to work out plot holes in my head.
After the writing, the artistic side of things, there comes the business part. The emails, the answering of comments, and the scheduling of social media posts and recording and editing of YouTube videos. I always have a string of marketing projects I want to work on and a long to-do list of projects I haven’t finished yet.
I’ve always had trouble finishing things. My nature is excitable, spontaneous, imaginative. At the age of thirteen, I had finished exactly one ‘chapter book’ and that was way back when I was six. I was tired of never finishing, I was tired of the vague words of ‘someday’ and ‘soon’ and ‘maybe’ that haunted my dream of authorship. In November 2016, I set a date for the thirtieth. I signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I set a word count goal: thirty thousand total, one thousand written daily.
It took me hours each day to reach that daily word count goal because I wasn’t nearly as quick a typer as I am now, and there were days, many of them when I didn’t want to write at all. But I couldn’t spend any longer waiting for ‘someday’.
I finished my first draft at the end of the month. I printed it out on my family’s black and white printer. I hugged it and cried.
Around four of five in the evening, I finish work and go upstairs to help my parents prepare supper and clean the house. We eat and then spend some time together as a family, playing games, reading books, and watching movies. Then I head off to bed.
All of this is, of course, a very generalized day. It’s what I aim for, but life is never that simple. There are days when the basement floods and days when I eat supper alone because my siblings had gymnastics practice that evening. There are days my little sister throws a fit and doesn’t want to do school. There are days when I feel like throwing a fit myself - when I don’t want to do anything when I’m upset and stressed, or tired from staying up late at a friend’s house. There are days when I push through these feelings and do what I can, and there are days when I don’t.
Not every day has to look perfect to move you forward. Life is meant to be a mess sometimes, or at least my life is, and that’s ok.
It took me nine months total to write and publish my first book, Honey Butter. It took a lot of learning, reading, and research. But somehow, I did it, among the mess, and my debut novel, my lifelong dream, was published on August fourteenth, 2017.
I was over the moon, I thought that I had made all my wildest dreams come true.
I hadn’t.
Contrary to popular belief, no one thing plunges you into success. Truthfully, ‘success’ is just as slippery a word as ‘someday’. I still had a long way to go, and I still do. I wrote about this concept as my next work and published it as my second book. A book far better than the first in every way, Lydia Green of Mulberry Glen. I was featured on podcasts and websites, I visited schools, book clubs, and home school co-ops. I did book signings. I spoke and signed books at a writer’s conference in North Carolina.
Now I am writing my third book. I hope it will be better in every way then the two books that came before it.
My dreams are coming true, amidst the mess, and I hope that they will never stop coming true. I am always growing, always reaching, but never ‘making it’ and I wouldn’t want it any other way. As a wise character in my book, Lydia Green of Mulberry Glen says -
“As long as you are growing towards the light, you are moving in the right direction.”
Millie Florence is an adventurous homeschooler who published her first book, ‘Honey Butter’, at age 13. She loves sushi, zip lines, and just about all things yellow.
Millie lives in a picturesque blue house in the woods with her parents and her four siblings, plus a varying amount of cats and chickens.
You can find her at -
Instagram: @millieflorenceauthor
Facebook: @authormillieflorence
Youtube: Millie Florence
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