Friday, October 3, 2014

So I Finished the Manuscript...



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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