Now for the fun part...

Yesterday was a big day for me: I finished the first draft of a book I’ve been working on for several years. I moved it from Word into its editorial submission format and printed the monster. That’s it in the picture above.

I was cruising through Steven King’s On Writing the other day and sighed when he wrote that it takes him three months to do a first draft of a novel. He tends to write long novels. Four plus years for this latest of mine. Where has the time gone?

A baby girl, a kitchen remodel, a puppy, a tired, limited mind to work with, etc., etc.--the list of distractions and weaknesses goes on and on. But here I am at last, looking at a tall stack of 426 pages. This will be my third and probably last attempt to get a novel published. So no pressure. It’s only my lifelong dream about to succeed or expire.

I’m going to follow Mr. King’s advice and put the book away in a drawer for a while. (Not a drawer, actually, since no drawer in the house is safe from a certain tiny set of hands.) Work on landscaping our backyard is already underway, and I’ll become a working manager on that project for a few weeks while I let my brain, or what’s left of it, recover from the past months of hard work on character and pace and trying to avoid cliché and sentimentality. The first draft is the fun part, after all. The rewrite is the truly hard work. But I reached a milestone today, and that feels pretty darn good.