Mile Marker

It took me close to two and a half years, but I’ve finally finished my first novel.

I guess I technically finished it last weekend, but it’s taken me another full week to make sure I wouldn’t circle around immediately to the first chapter for yet more revisions. But that urge to recast a scene or pick a better turn of phrase didn’t come. I feel like it’s actually in good shape now. I feel like I’m ready to move on to the next part of the project.

When I started, the idea was to see if I could string enough sentences together to tell a story. I wasn’t particularly interested in pushing boundaries, wasn’t trying to blaze any trails. I picked a few simple ideas that had long interested me, and was content to see what mixing them together would bring out.

And man oh man, did mixing those ideas together create some really strange material. A lot of the most satisfying stuff came from pushing myself to solve conflicts or issues with structure as creatively as possible, to really try for something that I could be proud of.

And I am proud of what I’ve written. I’m proud of having done something that has taken on its own shape, that lives entirely outside of my own head, that I can share with others.

In the coming months, while I’m trying to figure out how best to push the manuscript through the square peg/ round hole world of publishing, I’ll be talking more specifically about what inspired me to write this thing, and where I see it going next.

But for now I just want to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing the first major step in an arduous process.