Cue the Hallelujah Chorus, please!

It's finished! It's rough around the edges, but the "put your butt in the chair and get it done" version is done! All twelve beautiful pages of it : )

I just wrote a long blog about how good it felt to get this done. Of course, I hit a key of some kind and erased it. Oh, well.

I swore to myself when I began this process that I would never again leave a story with holes in it, like I did this one. It was too hard to get back into it. But here's the thing: I think the distance helped me see problems that I might not have seen as quickly otherwise. Yes, the gaps were troublesome, but not because they were gaps but because they were indicators, I believe, that I didn't know enough about the story to fill them in. Instead of forcing a solution in there when I didn't have any perspective about what worked in the story and what didn't, I left it alone for a time. For awhile there, I thought that was a mistake because I just kept finding more and more gaps that I didn't know how to fill. I thought my distance from the story had caused me to lose touch with it. But I think what I discovered is that I didn't really even know the story well enough to lose touch with it. If that makes sense?!?

Anyway, now I have to go through and put in the little bits here and there that are missing. The pieces that will help it flow better. Then it needs to be cleaned up, put in proper format. And then, of course, polishing the prose. Want to make it so interesting that people are eager to see how everything plays out on the page...the real page!

Whew. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. Though, I know that feeling is only temporary. After all, the book hasn't been accepted yet! : )

Have a good weekend, everybody!