Today was a momentous day -- I finished the first draft of my romance novel! Now I have to go back, edit for continuity, and look for places that need to be tightened or expanded. But with a first draft finished now, I feel confident that I can get a readable, ready-to-critique second draft later this month, and hopefully I can get a few key people to read it in July so that I can start submitting it to potential agents in August.
After finishing (~4500 words/18 pages, written in Des Moines, at the cafe in Borders where I usually get my best work done), I couldn't tell whether what I was feeling was euphoria at completing the draft, or jitters from the two triple lattes and the Diet Coke I drank while typing, or overkill from listening to Gavin Rossdale's new song 'Another Night in the Hills' 62 times in a row. I'm going to go with euphoria -- it's so rare that I actually finish a project after starting it that I'm unfamiliar with the feeling, but I want to have it more often. That means finishing the second draft, polishing it, sending it to agents, and hopefully beginning the long road to publication -- and starting to write my second book (which I already have some fabulous ideas for).
Two other things of note happened today. The first may only interest fellow former grads of Wayne Community -- I ran into everyone's favorite substitute teacher, usually called Mrs. Gus by the kids, at Borders. She was waiting there for a friend, and we talked for about half an hour. She just got back from a nineteen-day trip to Greece and Turkey with her brothers and their wives, and they apparently had a fabulous time. For those of you who care, she's still substitute teaching (and just renewed her license to continue doing so). She also wants to read my romance novel if I ever publish it, and I would lump her into the group of people whom I would be happy (rather than apprehensive) to share it with, so that's cool. However, when her friend showed up, she introduced me as Becky even though she knows my name is Sara -- Becky is, as frequent readers know, my aunt, and I get called Becky all the time around here. Now I just need to find a scandalous pirate boyfriend...
Secondly, and this will probably interest no one, we're in the middle of continued severe weather. My euphoria wore off just a little bit on the way home because I was trying to outrun a line of fast-moving storms -- hard to do when you have to drive south for an hour and a half and the storms are moving west-to-east. I made it, but I'm glad that I didn't stay in Des Moines any longer. I played some Wii when I got home, then went upstairs to watch Craig -- but he was interrupted five minutes in by our chief meteorologist, and when I came back down to write this an hour and forty-five minutes later, the meteorologist was still going strong. Our county was south of the tornado line for the second night in a row, but we did have a half-hour period of v. high winds and v. heavy rainfall a little after midnight.
Too bad Iowa and California can't do some moisture exchange -- California's in a drought, but we're expected to get more rain for the next several days, and the major rivers in central Iowa are already reaching flood stage. We've gotten so much rain this spring that there are still a lot of fields that haven't been planted, and the fields that have been planted are on the verge of being washed out. So if you think food's expensive now, wait until the grain harvests fail...
But it's hard to be pessimistic about the future when I've just finished the first draft. So I'm going to bed, and will pretend that my pillow is a laurel wreath. Goodnight!
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