Almost Done

I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected.

Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it.

But it appears it’s very close to being done. I came home from my D&D game tonight to an e-mail containing edits from TPP and they contain the phrase “mostly line edits with a few comments.” After months of stressing over plot holes and backstory-wrangling, those words are freakin’ magical. It means at some point in the future I can stop thinking about the novella and it can go off and be a book. The curse of seeing this news at eleven o’clock at night is that there’s no-one to call and say “holy freaking shit, its almost done,” so I’ll say it here instead:

Holy freakin’ shit, it’s almost done.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to drink a glass of scotch and collapse into the most relaxing night of sleep I’ll have had since…I dunno…probably January.