One Day – or Day One?

There was no grand decision.

No particular morning when I sat down, opened my laptop and declared:

Today, I become an author.

The truth about day one is far more complicated than that.

I have been trying to decide when mine happened. Looking backwards, searching for the moment when one day became day one.

All I know is that it began with those two words.

One day.

The First Possibility

My thoughts travel all the way back to my German teacher in middle school—a man who seemed to carry the permanent scent of cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave.

He often smiled at my excessively long homework assignments and proudly read them aloud to the rest of the class.

“Claudia will write a book one day,” he used to say.

Perhaps, in some small way, this is partly his doing.

Perhaps those words settled somewhere inside me long before I understood what they might become.

But that was not day one.

Years later, when I was in my early twenties, I took writing classes.

I never told anyone.

By then, I was one of the cool kids — not yet knowing that being one of the cool kids meant absolutely nothing and that hiding something you loved was not particularly cool at all.

I could have started writing then.

In fact, I did write for a while.

But I was a wild spirit, far too curious about the world outside my head to remain inside it long enough to finish a novel. There were too many places to go, people to meet, and mistakes waiting to be made with great enthusiasm.

So that was definitely not day one either.

“One day, when I am old,” I said instead. “When I am forty.”

Yes, I know.

I had my moments of brilliance.

If time travel ever becomes possible, I will go back and slap my younger self for several things she used to say. This one would certainly make the list.

Forty.

Ancient, apparently.

Still One Day

The funny thing is, I did buy a laptop a few years later to write that book.

One book.

In my mind, it had always been only one.

I imagined I would sit down, choose a story and write it. A straightforward plan, really.

Except I could not decide which story to tell.

I typed a fair amount, but never enough of any one idea to turn it into something whole. The laptop filled with fragments, beginnings and characters who never had the chance to discover what happened to them.

I was writing.

But I was not yet writing the book.

It still belonged to one day.

Day One

That laptop never held my first novel.

Its replacement did.

My husband bought it for me as a birthday present, and one day I opened it and wrote a single scene.

A woman carried water from a riverbed, through a magical veil and into a crossroads turned village.

That was all it was supposed to be.

One scene.

But then I kept going.

The scene became a chapter. The chapter became a story. And, somewhere along the way, a new question entered my life.

What if?

What if I wrote in the language I truly loved?

What if I told that woman’s story?

What if I finished the book?

What if I wrote part two?

What if I finished the entire trilogy?

What if I published it?

Each question led to another.

Each possibility made the next one feel slightly less impossible.

And then coincidence entered the story.

My mother-in-law came to visit from London and told me that a friend of hers had self-published a book.

“He swears by it,” she said.

Around the same time, the indie author of a book I adored moved into traditional publishing. I had been eager to read her next book, but when it arrived, it was nowhere near as good as the one she had published independently.

At least, not to me.

Then my nephew finished his graphic design diploma and was eager to prove himself. He wanted to design my books for me.

All small coincidences.

All pointing in the same direction.

And I have always been a firm believer that there is no such thing as coincidence.

So I followed them.

I knew nothing about publishing. I had no carefully constructed plan and certainly no idea that one finished manuscript would eventually grow into three published books, an imprint, a website and another entire world waiting for its turn.

I simply answered one what if after another.

What if I learn how?

What if I try?

What if I can?

And somehow, I did.

The Day Without a Date

That is why I cannot tell you when day one happened.

Was it the day my teacher first said I would write a book?

The day I secretly enrolled in a writing class?

The day I bought that first laptop?

The birthday when my husband gave me its replacement?

Was it the moment I wrote that first scene? The moment I finished Fearbound? Or the moment I stopped asking whether I could finish the trilogy and simply continued writing it?

Perhaps it was the day my mother-in-law mentioned self-publishing.

Perhaps it was the day my nephew offered to design the books.

Or perhaps it was the moment I pressed publish and sent Fearbound beyond my reach.

But by then, surely, day one had already happened.

That is the strange thing about beginnings. We expect them to announce themselves. We imagine a clear decision, a brave first step, a date we can circle on a calendar and point to later.

Sometimes, perhaps, that is how they happen.

Mine did not.

Mine hid beneath years of one day. It slipped quietly between unfinished pages, one completed scene and a growing collection of what ifs. It lived inside a series of small decisions that never seemed large enough to change my life on their own.

Until they had.

Perhaps day one was not a day at all.

Perhaps it was every time I chose to keep going.

Every time what if I fail? became what if I can?

Every time I took something that belonged to one day and moved it a little closer to now.

I cannot give my day one a date.

I only know that somewhere between one woman carrying water through a magical veil and me pressing publish on Fearbound, it happened.

Quietly. Without permission. Without announcement.

One day became day one.

And I was already living it before I knew it had begun.