As a family historian I'm in the process of writing biographies and thought I'd take a creative writing class to make the biographies more interesting. I audited an Honors writing class that focused on writing a novel. As I was going to write something from the past, I decided to write a historical novel. What I didn't expect was how much I loved writing it. I was used to academic writing. That was several years ago and I started and stopped the novel several times over the years. It wasn't until I joined a local writers critique group and tried my hand at writing 50,000 words in a month through the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I finished the novel. Then came the hard part: revision, revision, revision and multiple edits.