A Monster Completed

(Originally posted at SCHUYLER'S MONSTER.)

I finished the manuscript this week, only two days after my own personal deadline and a full month before it's actually due to St. Martin's Press. I think that's pretty impressive on its own merits, but for a historically uninspired foot-dragging slacker like myself, it's nothing short of miraculous.

I'm cleaning it up now and having Julie read through it, partially to help edit but mostly to give me her perspective on how true it feels and whether or not I've left out anything she'd consider important to Schuyler's story. I'm writing this book about my experience; I wouldn't try to tell Julie's story any more than I'd want someone trying to tell mine. But she's the only person who's lived through this whole thing with me, aside from Schuyler, whose literary aspirations are still in the developmental stage.

This is not to say that Schuyler’s not stretching her wordsmith wings. As noted on one of the pages at Prentke-Romich (makers of the Big Box of Words), Schuyler occasionally uses her device to pen such poignant missives as her earliest attempts at both memoir ("When I was little I cry. Now I can swim.") and naturalism ("Rabbit eat carrot. Rabbit eat flower. It can jump. It can hide and run.")

I printed it off to make editing easier, and I was a little daunted at how big it was. 85,000 words doesn't feel like a lot when, you know, you're writing them one at a time. I expect to have this part finished by next week, and then it's off to my editor at SMP, where she will begin the process of deconstructing it and turning it into something akin to an actual book suitable for publication.

I am both thrilled and terrified at the thought of someone actually reading this thing at last. That seems to be a recurring theme in this process.

I have no idea what happens from this point on, although I've been warned that it's not always pretty. (One writer friend ended his congratulatory email the other day with "Enjoy this moment -- now the disillusionment begins...") But no matter what happens now, do you know what I did? I wrote a book, start to finish. I am now officially swell.