Token Self-Indulgent Victory Post

“I lost too much energy trying to get a hold of your Ranger friend,” Alex admitted. He turned his gorgeous seawater gaze on me, sunken behind a pair of nasty looking black eyes. “I will not be doing that again. I did it, though. I found him. I don’t think he appreciated being knocked out.”

“Well, maybe now he’ll stop cracking jokes,” I muttered.

A slow smile spread across Alex’s cracked and fractured face. “We had a nice talk, truncated as it was by him having to go save a damsel in distress.”

“About what? About me?”

He wrapped his arms around me and I stayed there, feeling him breathe in whatever imagined scent he had for my hair. His lips pressed to the top of my head, my forehead, my cheek. I knew he was about to leave me, and I didn’t know when I would be getting him back.

“Sunshine, the whole world does not revolve around you.”

I know most of you have probably seen this already on Facebook -

I did it.

On June 9th, 2013, I typed the infamous "***" that marks the end of a manuscript.

Halfer's very first rough draft is entirely finished. At 267 pages and 81,846 words, the story I've been working on since I was barely a teenager is now on paper.

Though, "finished" is a funny word. A perhaps, fairly inaccurate word. Not even five minutes had gone by since I finished it up, drove out to Office Depot to print out a hard copy, and walked out the door with a 267 page bundle in my arms, that I started remembering things I needed to fix.

It's like art.

You know that mess of bubbles and lines that go down on the paper before a body can even take its shape in a drawing? I feel like that's Halfer in its current form. Bubbles and lines, and maybe a really good-looking leg that I don't really want to erase for fear of smudging the paper with graphite.

So I guess in some sense of the word, I'm "finished" with this rough draft.

But in others, I still have very far to go.

I need to connect many more dots, still. Things happen in response to things that don't really matter, a character was possibly introduced much too late, some motivations only finally looked screwy when I was staring at them in person. So far I have two scenes I need to add in...and no idea where to put them.

Furthermore, Halfer turned out to be only half the story I was trying to tell. What started as "maybe I should just put the story into a Part 1/Part 2 situation" has evolved into "what if I wrote one book...and then wrote another?" The arc would close up very cleanly if I can make this work, and I no longer feel intimidated about keeping the tension going for twice as long.

So if I can clean Halfer up and get it shipped out to an agent, or Amazon, or whatever I decide to do with it (isn't this exciting?) then I can then begin working on Whiteflame, the second book and most likely conclusion to Rena's story.

Oof, that sounds super grown-up.

So a rough(er) draft is completed, and holy cannoli am I giddy.

I'll make a post about the software I've been using to map Halfer out later this week, but it seems like it's going to save me a lot of money on post-it notes. But now? It's time to edit this bad boy.