Big Day

Today, Oct. 26, I finished the rough draft of a novel I've been working on intermittently since the summer of '09. The word count comes out to somewhere between 65,000 and 68,000, depending on the software.

This is exciting for me because it's the culmination of a lot of hard work. It's also the second story I've ever actually seen through to completion. The first, which I was also excited about and proud of, was a rough draft of a short story that I wrote over a week in August while taking a break from the novel.

I won't say what it's about. To anyone. Even the mistress.

I'll tell you this though. There is still a lot of work to be done. What's going to happen now is I'm going to spell check it, format it nice and double space it, print it out, put it in a binder, and put that binder on a shelf for another day.

After some time passes, I'll come back to it, read through it, and take lots of notes about things I like, things I hate, and things to change.

Then I'll prop that bidner up on my desk and I'll re-write the whole story.

Then I'll print that out, set it on a shelf. Sometime later, I'll re-read that version, make notes, then prop that binder up and make those changes.

Then, maybe, if I'm lucky and I work very hard, I'll have something worth showing someone.

Until then though, I'll just be proud of doing something that just a couple years ago I would have assumed I'd never do.

Oh, also, I might have forgot to mention:
I didn't get into any schools so the mistress and I quit our jobs and moved in with her dad out in the country where someday she might get some land that we hope to build a house on, deep in the woods, where we can keep bees and raise chickens and goats and garden and just kinda be ourselves but in the meantime we're both broke and working part-time jobs and generally questioning the wisdom of moving in with a man who eats one meal a day that consists of a can of ravioli and half a bag of croutons.