So as it turns out, I’m terrible at blogging. Big surprise
there. Anyways, going forward I’m going to try really, really hard to stay
current on this thing, so…updates.
A ton of stuff has happened these past few months. The book
is finished. And by ‘the book,’ I mean the one I’ve been bursting my brain
trying to write for nearly two years now. Anywho, that book. It’s done. Wrapped. Finished. Sort of. I’ve done
everything I could conceivably do to the darn thing. It’s as edited and
polished as I can get it. That happened somewhere back in July, toward the end
of the month, I believe. Which means that it’s been just under two years since
I first started on this particular manuscript.
Anyways, so I finally finished the writing and editing part
of this thing back in July, and let me tell you, it felt so freaking weird. At
first it was this big sort of relief that after all this time and work and
rewriting and whatnot, I finally had a completed manuscript to show for it. And
not just any completed manuscript. It was one I was immensely proud of, one
that I actually believe in. That’s a very validating feeling…
That lasted for about two days. Don’t get me wrong, I still
feel the same way about the manuscript. I love it. It’s my child, or something
like that. But I just couldn’t bask in the warm fuzzies like I thought I’d want
to after all this time. What actually happened was pretty much the exact
opposite. I got hit with this really intense urge to finish another manuscript.
So after starting the querying process (which I’ll talk about in a different
post, probably) I jumped right into my next project. Actually, it was more like
rotating my next project up to the newly vacated priority one spot, seeing as
I’m almost never working exclusively on just one thing at a time. So yeah, no
celebration, no rest period, nothing special at all. And you know something?
That’s fine with me. Because it was never really my plan to just write one
thing and then be done. Writing is something I’ve been doing each and every day
for the past six years, so I don’t know why I thought that might change just
because I finish something.
But something weird happened about two weeks after I’d gone
on to the new project. I started having withdrawal symptoms. I don’t have kids,
but I would compare how I felt about finishing that first manuscript to raising
a child and seeing him or her go off to college. I’m probably way off with that
analogy, but it’s the only one I could think of. That feeling still hits me,
nearly three months later. I miss being in the character’s heads. I miss them
all being in my head. I miss imagining their world and mucking around with them.
Sigh.
So of course, I went back and read the book. I’d been trying
not to do that, because I didn’t want to come back to it and fall back into
editing mode. Fortunately, I didn’t. I was able to read it through as a reader
only, without dragging out the old red pen. That was pretty cool. After that I
put it away, and I haven’t really thought about the manuscript in about a month
now, which, for something that has been a constant part of my life for nearly
two years, is very strange.
But, I’m adjusting. This whole thing is, for lack of a
better, more descriptive word, interesting.
And weird. Definitely weird.
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