Fin

I broke my Monday and Wednesday blogging streak yesterday for two reasons.

1. My middle kid had a blood draw scheduled right after school and I was pretty worried about how that would go down since he is the obstinate one. He did extremely well but was angry with me afterward, though it’s honestly hard to differentiate that hostility from his regular brand.

2. I spent the hours before his appointment finishing my first draft! She is rough, and the re-writing will probably take longer than the writing, because now I have to go back and research all the history in this time period for real to make sure I haven’t completely misunderstood the situation in my book. Plus, all the mentions of the Orthodox Church and the references to the vegetables in the garden have to be at least reasonably accurate so that if someone reads it they aren’t immediately taken out of the book when I claim that dill grows in the fall, or something.

Even if I can’t make the book any better, it feels good to finish it. I wrote a whole book! There are holes and inconsistencies and errors but hey! A book! Anything you don’t write from start to finish in one sitting is going to have a general weirdness of repetition or misalignment, where you’ve forgotten what you said before or decided to go a different direction that doesn’t match what you wrote the day before. So, the glaring errors I can probably fix, but the how-to-write-good-fiction stuff will probably take years to figure out. But still. Book!

I got out my red pen to start editing but my printer isn’t working and my tech support/husband is on a call so I think I’ll just do nothing (besides supervising virtual school and entertaining a three year old) for now. There are things that need to be cleaned and calls to make, but I’m just so tired because I wrote a book. Have I said that already? Because I did. A whole book!

The writers on Masterclass have been extremely helpful, and also a friend who is a fellow author (I say “fellow” because, I, too, have written a book) was supportive and grounding. I do feel like I need a whole masters program on writing fiction alone because its just a lot and I’m constantly impressed by world-builders and people who can write 100,000 words about events during just a few days. I think I’ll do a collection of essays next, because my attention span is about 5000 words, max. After that I get confused and inconsistent, which you’ll see if you ever read this book, which I wrote myself.

Friends, I have written a book (not sure if I said that already?) and it is definitely the length of a real, honest to God, novel. It’s historical fiction but just the setting and background events — no famous figures appear in the story. That was entirely too much pressure to get right. My book has words, so many words, and characters and too much description and grammatical errors! It’s glorious.

The book, which I have written, now requires at least as much work to fix as it took to write, so I think I’ll take a nap to prepare myself.

Thank you for your time.

PS I WROTE A BOOK