I WROTE A BOOK

Past. Freaking. Tense.

It's still kind of sticking in my mouth, almost like I unconsciously know I didn't finish like four chapters or left a gigantic plot hole or something, but (according to my mother) I'm so anal that these scenarios are pretty doubtful.

As my husband pointed out to me last night after I stared at him for five minutes trying to get the words out: now comes the "fun" part.

I have a slight correction to that statement. To lose the quotation marks.

My editing self can finally breathe. She's been tied up and gagged for months now, only getting out of her prison cell to have 15 minutes of exercise every few days.

My writing self is still in shock that she has a first draft, and might end up crying over it at some point. But to this chick, writing it was the "fun" part.


Now that the first installment of my story is out and no longer scratching behind my eyeballs to get on the page, I can start making it coherent to everyone without access to my brain. And this is exciting. Thrilling. I'm actually looking forward to it.

(Check back with me soon on this matter. I might change my mind about it and be begging to allow my writing self to be let out for exercise. If this is the case, just remind me that I *currently* have 2 more full-length novels and 6+ novellas to write.)

But for now, I'm going to eat lunch on my lunch break, and not pull the computer out as soon as I put the baby to bed. I'm just going to bask in the euphoric state of past-tenseness and enjoy being in the I WROTE A BOOK club.

Then the editor will wait impatiently for a handful of people to read and make suggestions before she goes to town and makes the writer cry.

in my sight, and almost in my nostrils

Scarily enough (and it really does scare be a bit... a lot... yeah, it's terrifying to stare into the abyss), I can see the end of my manuscript, or MS as it's called in bookland.

I can see it. It's there. And it's unknown.

I've had "an idea for a book" for years.

I've been "writing a book" for months.

But I've never "written a book" before. That just seems odd to me. It kinda gets stuck in my throat when I try to practice saying it. (You know, think back to 7th grade when you practiced signing your name with your crush's last name like you were going to get married? No, just me? Well then...)

I've been tracking my progress by chapter/scene now instead of word count. Once I got over the NaNoWriMo hump of 50k, it was just like, "this is a lot of words." Not only am I tracking my progress, I'm channeling my writing by making a to-do list.

My list now looks like this:

Reorder everything to fit new timeline
Ch 13
Ch 14
finish Ch 16
Ch 18
finish Ch 19
Ch 20
Ch 21
finish Ch 27
finish Ch 35
finish Ch 38
finish Ch 39
finish Ch 42
Ch 43
finish Ch 45

I know 10 things left on this list (since I made it about a week ago) seems like a lot, so how do I see the abyss already?

Well I'll tell you how, Curious George. See all those chapters that say "finish" in front? Yeah, that means I just need to connect a few things or write an opening/closing paragraph for them. BAH! So yeah, I can see that abyss. I'll probably be able to smell it in a few days. I hope it smells like honeysuckles. That is my favorite smell in the entire universe.

All this babbling about almost being done and seeing the abyss of the unknown and blah blah blah does not by any means mean (haha, see what I did there?) that I've forgotten about the editing phase. Duh, I'm an editor.

My naive hope is that since I've been unable to resist editing so much along the way that this phase might have been reduced. At least a little bit. Even just a few days would make me feel less insane.
Powered by Blogger.