Wrote the last chapter!

I had planned on rewriting this week.

Instead, this morning I was inspired to start writing the last chapter. For which I'd been waiting for inspiration.

One thing became immediately clear. The creating part, the first draft exploring and discovering part, is the fun part. After spending the last couple of months dealing with grammar and spelling and continuity and such, it was a jolt of creative energy to write new material.

If my first drafts were good enough, I'd be a very prolific writer, I tell you.

If only.

Maybe if I'd spent the last 25 years learning the craft of writing. But really...how could I have done that? I doubt anyone spends 25 years learning and not producing. So I just get back to my original choice of -- making a living, having a life, having a wife and family -- or being a starving writer in a garret.

I'm pretty sure I made the right decision.


Later: I finished the last chapter, #34.

I reserve the right to keep working on it until I finally let go of the entire book. The last chapter is probably the second most important chapter, after the first chapter.

I keep reminding myself that I'm simply telling a story as best I can, that I'm not trying to create "ART". That way lies madness.

I don't know if it wows, yet. It satisfies I hope. But I want it to do more than that if possible. But the rough draft is there, and now I can work on it. So...at this point, the book could actually be called complete, if I got hit by a truck tomorrow.

I told Linda that, and she said, yeah, you'd feel pretty good.

Errr....hit by a truck?

Yeah, you'd be done.

Ah, O.K. heh.

I have a small epilogue to write, which I guess would be chapter #35, but the story is more or less complete without it. I want to wrap up a few of the loose ends, but it isn't strictly necessary.

How about that? Good, bad or indifferent, at least I wrote it. I'm actually really feeling pretty good, all of a sudden. Unexpectedly. It seems so daunting when you start.

And I'm not so burned out that I'm not willing to start the next book, of which I've already got 2 and a half chapters done. (Excised chapters of this book, the next book is more or less a prequel...) I'm hoping to do a minimum of three books with these characters and settings, maybe more depending on how they go over...

I've got a couple of people lined up who are going to critique the book. I was worried about whether they would like it, but maybe I'm expecting too much. Maybe they are already prepared to expect less than perfect. I'm just asking that they try to help make it better.

So take the next ten days to give it one more run through, then print out some hard copy manuscripts, and hopefully get them back in a month or two with helpful suggestions, and then do the last draft. So my June 1 deadline is still looking about right. (Maybe sooner, but not later.)