The Year of the Winding Road

I participated in National Novel Writing Month in 2021, where I decided to write a fictionalized memoir of my junior year. I titled it The Year of the Winding Road, in homage to Sheryl Crow’s song Every Day is a Winding Road, a song that was popular in that timeframe.

It was a leap for me, since I rarely write general fiction in anything longer than a short story. I like the magical and the fantasy, hence The Magician and my Portals Series. But a friend challenged me to write something out of my comfort zone, so I did. And I completed the NaNoWriMo that year.

I wasn’t intending on ever publishing the novel that I had written. I did let a few friends from high school that I am still close to and some others I trusted see the manuscript as I wrote it, adding their input and some of their details into the story as well. The other half listened to parts of it as I read them out loud. But this was just a cathartic writing that I did to resolve some things that were brewing at the time in my head.

But then a friend asked me about it, starting a small idea that perhaps I could publish it. But like The Magician, I wanted to post it as a serial novel that was free to read.

So, after some massive overhauls and edits, I have decided that it will be. I will start posting it here on this blog on 07 June 2025 and do a bi-weekly posting (every other Saturday) at 10:00 until all .

The year is 1997. The scene is Southern California. Brianna Washington is embarking on her junior year of high school. But that year seems to be as winding as the road a popular song on the radio sings about. Brianna finds friendship, love and some adventure all while dealing with her everyday life, trying to figure out how to balance her own wants and needs against the person her family and friends expect her to be.

When tragedy strikes and her heart is broken, she begins to question where the road of life is winding to. Can she keep the relationships she holds dear alive? Can she get a little bit closer to feeling fine instead of feeling like she’s just a stranger to life? Can she manage the year of the winding road?

Check out the book trailer:

Note to readers:

While this story does have events in it that were inspired by true life and the people who made them happen, it is fictional, meaning it is made up.  The people, aside from the popular culture figures that pepper this novel, were created using qualities and quirks I have observed in the people I have met in real life.  The places are also made up.  The popular culture figures are used fictionally, though I tried to remain true to them in my writing.

The emotions though are very real.  High school is a time for angst.  High school is a time for finding one’s self and learning who and what one will become.  I tried to keep that ribbon alive in this piece of fiction.  

The journal entries for the most part are real.  I still have the real journal that I wrote in during my junior year of high school, and while I changed the timeline of some of the entries, I tried to keep it true to the voice I used as a seventeen-year-old writer.  The journal, along with the literary magazine in which I was published and a number of my other high school memories reside in a box in my basement, making the moves with me through life. 

Chapters

Click on a chapter title to go to that chapter.

I took a break from editing this story in early November. Read here to see why: Apologies

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction written by K. S. Wood, and thus is copyrighted 2025. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.  All rights reserved.

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