I just finished my first draft. Wrote the last words, tied like a ribbon on something I’ve been carrying with me for 8 years – and when I think of it, in a more general sense, it’s been with me for 20. It’s a sense of completion, so I’m feeling a bit exhausted, but also that hand-me-a-cigarette sense of being done.
I’ve been keeping this journal while I write my book knowing that the first thing I’d be working on once I was done the book would be the website. But I’ve realized that posting journal entries for a book nobody has read, for something that happened in the past, would be a bit weird. So what I’ve decided to do is to hold onto them, make this the first journal entry (even though it is, itself, written in the past) and re-emerge those novel entries when and if I publish the book. That way people have a bit of reference and, if they haven’t read it, a bit of build up to when they do.
In any case I am done. And yet, as Robert Frost said, I have miles to go before I sleep. The plan is to take a week off and just clean my mind: play some video games and read some pulpy books. And then it will be back to work, looking for freelance work, working on my website and writing short stories to submit to various contests.
