So I've written a book.

It's a very weird thing to say. It seems so pretentious and overly ambitious and like I'm completely full of myself and delusional, but it's bizarrely true; I actually wrote a book. There it is, up in that picture. It's not completely finished, of course - it seems like everything I write needs about 957 revisions before I even begin to debate letting other people read - but look at all those pages, bound together in a plastic sheath of finality. I'm not sure if it's a good book, or even largely readable (blah blah self doubt blah blah creeping despair etc), but it's a little too late now. Now I have to polish it up, do my last set of revisions, and pass it along to my two long suffering primary readers, Zanzabara (Leader of the Not-So-Free World - KNEEL) and Tina (the Super Awesome Cool Person) (This is ridiculous - I did not come up with either of these, for the record). If they like it and give me the green light, I'm going to start sharing it with a third set of already enlisted readers (for whom I do not yet have pseudonym requests, praise it all). It's remarkable how many encouraging (and strange) people I know. Quite a few friends and acquaintances alike, upon hearing I finished the stupid thing, went "So when can I read it?" Very sweet, very supportive, and apparently possessing little regard for personal sanity. Two of them didn't even ask what it was about.

I didn't tell them. I'm sure it will go well.

Currently, however, the manuscript is collecting dust on my drafting table. Though I proceeded to rip the plastic binding off and wave it around in a fit of excitement about two seconds after I got it (ask Tina the Super Awesome Cool Person - I practically hit her in the face with it), I gingerly set it aside almost immediately afterwards for two reasons:

1) I carefully set it aside because, surprisingly, Stephen King told me to. Well, not personally. I would have made much more of a fuss had Stephen King shown up at my house to talk books. No, I read his advice in On Writing, which was a very fun book to read. King's advice is that, when a first draft is completely finished, to set it aside for a minimum of 6 weeks. King promotes the idea of starting something new to take your mind off the finished work in an effort to distance yourself. (I found that to be very good advice, since when I initially began revising two days after getting the manuscript, I was correcting EVERYTHING). So, that was one of my reasons to set the manuscript aside. The other reason was

2) Because I  forgot to put page numbers on any of it. I have since numbered them all by hand while skyping with Zanzabara, Leader of the Not-So-Free World (Kneel). It's only about 169 pages, but damned if I'd be able to put it back together again with no page numbers. I'd probably just set it all on fire and pay 20 bucks to print it off again.

So those are my two wonderful, completely mature reasons for why I've put off my second to last (I hope) revision. We're slowly reaching the 5 week mark, though, and I feel that will be about the limit of my rumination time. I'll admit that I haven't really started anything new, but I have written eight short stories (don't ask - about two are good, and by good I mean I don't wince when re-reading them) and there is the small fact that the fifth week coincides with Spring Break. I plan on spending that whole week doing the revisions. At this point, I've written the story, revised the story, rewritten some of the revisions, scrapped the rewrites and wrote the whole thing over AGAIN, and then revised THAT before printing. If it sucks, that's pretty much how it's going to stay. I just... have the compulsive need to look at it again.

Well, that's what I'll be doing for awhile. Unfortunately, afterwards I'm pretty certain that I'll be going completely crazy while waiting for feedback from Tina the Super Awesome Cool Person and Zanzabara, Leader of the Not-So-Free World (KNEEL). I've decided that I should probably have more than one project going just in case, you know, the book completely sucks. That's where this blog comes in. I've got ideas and plans and projects in my head, but the thing is that I never really talk about them with anyone, and because of my lack of willingness to communicate (I'm weird about this stuff, again - ask Tina the Super Awesome Cool Person about the time I dragged her on a walk to talk about the plot for a story she was already reading because I felt weird talking about it in a normal setting) these projects and ideas just sort of... never happen. Maybe if I share a couple of ideas, and get some low level feedback along the lines of "DIDN'T YOU SAY YOU WERE GOING TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY OF ANTELOPES? WHERE IS IT?" then maybe I'll get inspired.

Maybe. I don't know. We'll see. Until then, don't actually mention antelopes to me. That's totally not my story.