Abigail Sharpe: Inspiration came from 'Sound of Music'

It's Oct. 1. Do you know what that means? It means that millions of writers around the world are thinking "One more month until NaNoWriMo." That's short for National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated. One of the initiated, Abigail Sharpe, author of Who Wants to Marry a Cowboy, which comes out in spring, joins us now to get us inspired about the upcoming month devoted to writing a novel in 30 days.

Abigail: Picture it: Summer of 1998. North Central Florida. A community theater production of The Sound of Music. Twelve women clad in black and white, on stage for about 15 minutes of a 2 1/2-hour show, forced to remain silent backstage. What can they do to pass the time?

Read.

I read the latest The Wheel of Time book. Others were reading Terry Goodkind or Nora Roberts or Sherlock Holmes. One read a book with a Scottish Highlander on the cover and was teased mercilessly by the stage manager for having a book with a half-naked man. But the book looked interesting, and my fellow nun seemed really engaged. The name? Outlander.

Easy enough to remember.

Fast-forward a couple of years while I patrolled the rows in my local library, browsing the books for something to read. I hadn't yet read that book with the Scottish guy on the cover, so I looked it up in the catalog. Outlander wasn't on the shelf, but Drums of Autumn was. Not realizing it was a series (happens to me all the time – that's another blog post in itself), I checked it out and happily devoured it over the next week. The rest (and beginning) of the series followed.

The year 2005 arrived, and in a happy coincidence, Heather the kilt-reading nun from The Sound of Music started working with my husband. In October of that year, Diana Gabaldon was doing a book signing about an hour away, and I invited Heather to go with me.

On the way, she mentioned NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. I had been thinking about writing a novel and this seemed the perfect opportunity.

So I did it. And "won."

And had a great time.

And decided I wanted to do it again and again.

Who knows if this would have happened if Heather and I hadn't been nuns together or if she read Star Trek novels instead of Outlander? Would I have sat on my desires, embarrassed at the thought that I could write something another person – outside of my family – would want to read? Most writers put pen to paper while still in their teens. I was in my 30s. But I did it anyway.

If you're thinking about it, so should you.

To find out more about Abigail and her upcoming books, you can visit her website, AbigailSharpe.com.

And to find out more about National Novel Writing Month, which starts Nov. 1, you can check out NaNoWriMo.org.