I think this is a book.

No matter what else happens, it's obvious to me that the last two rewrites of Nearly Human have improved the book. 

There's that moment in a book where it just clicks, and you know you've got the real thing on your hands.  I hadn't been feeling that, until recently.  As you know, I've been hesitant.  I kept putting the book down and going and writing other things for awhile.

I've written two other books in the course of working on Nearly Human.  I've rewritten an entire separate manuscript since, and I've got a good solid first draft of a fantasy down.

 I kept coming back and wrestling with this book, thinking there was something there.  And walking away frustrated, making improvements but knowing it still was floundering.

But I laid down that last read-through a couple of night ago, and went -- huh, what do you know?  This reads like a book.

But what an effort!   I've put over two years into this manuscript, off and on.  It has completely changed from the beginning in tone and plot. 

There's not much more I can do with it, for now.  I'm just seeing a jumble of words now.  I mean, I can tell it's much more polished and integrated and so on.

But the emotional content, and the pacing -- I'm just having a hard time feeling it anymore.

So, I'll send it off and set it aside and come back to it later.

But I will give myself credit for working hard on this book.  I told myself that I wouldn't be premature about sending it off.  That I'd wait for the moment when it clicked.

Having a deadline really helped.  I really focused in the last week.  Having an outside editor was very helpful, I think, in pointing out inconsistencies and getting the writing itself more polished.  She did me a big favor by pointing me in the direction of cutting.  I probably wouldn't have done that on my own.

But also, she seemed to take the book very seriously, treat it as a real possibility.  "In the unlikely even the publisher doesn't take it..." is the way she phrased the last draft.  Heh.  Yes, it cost me to get her to work so hard on it, but like I've said before, I don't need much encouragement.

I just need to feel like I'm making progress.