I am in a weird place. For so long I have always had this one huge, indomitable project pressing on my shoulders and nagging my subconscious. Well, this weekend, Saturday morning to be precise, at about 4 AM, I decided that I had finished my novel. I closed my laptop and went to bed. I slept really well.
A few hours later, I got up and made breakfast. My poor wife is sick, so she did not play into these scenes. I fed and entertained our children. I took them to the park, and then to McDonald's. We had a nice enjoyable day. That afternoon, back at home, I was sitting with my wife. I was holding her hand. She looked miserable. I said, "I don't know if this means a whole lot to you, but I have to tell you... I finished my novel."
She may have nodded. She may have just been sleepy. She said, "That's great." Then she asked if I could take care of dinner. I totally get where she's coming from. I finished writing. That's great. Now what?
Time to unleash it on the world, right? Well, at least a few innocent, unsuspecting friends. I made a short list of the people that I know who I would trust with something like this. People that I'd shared my secret with, some of them only very recently. And I emailed them the Word doc and asked if they would read it.
It feels so odd to be done and now, just to be in the waiting phase. In fact, it was so weird, that I stayed up all night on Sunday and made mountains of edits! Then, I emailed out the new revised version to my involuntary beta readers on Monday morning. Now I'm just in the waiting phase... so how come I keep re-reading parts of my manuscript?
