the only one who's ever known who i am, who i'm not, who i want to be

DONE.

Well, not quite done. I need to go through the manuscript tomorrow and fix the tiny things that I've been putting off (clothing choices, anachronistic words, geography), and do a proofreading pass on the scenes that I wrote today. But, after sitting in Stanford library until almost midnight and writing twenty pages of new/expanded stuff (mostly the sex scenes, for those of you who are into that sort of thing -- which is kind of a weird thing to write in a library while everyone else is studying for their econ finals), I'm done with the actual writing. And that, my friends, means I'm on track to send it to my agent by the end of the week. I'm taking the weekend off and going to LA to see Terry, so I'm glad that I'll get a couple of days off before I start plotting the next book.

I was thinking today that being a writer is either going to make me or destroy me. Most of you (some more than others), have either observed or been a victim of my tendency to keep my emotions closed up in a little shell -- I don't like messes, and it's easier to ignore some things than to deal with them, whether that's actually a good idea in the long run or not. But writing the kinds of books I'm writing requires me to find some chink in the armor and let some of the emotion out onto the page that I would never figure out how to access in real life. And you can tell that I haven't shut off the spigot yet -- I'm too wiped out, as evidenced by the fact that I was reading the words aloud as I typed when I sent some emails a few minutes ago, which is something I normally don't have to do to make sure I'm coherent.

So anyway, in the crucible in which I write, it's not just characters and scenes and words that emerge -- it's some part of me, melted down and reformed into a story that is simultaneously not about me at all and the truest thing I've ever written. If it's not true, it doesn't have the resonance necessary to draw a reader in -- but by making it true, I'm bleeding myself into it. Whether that's a positive, cathartic bleeding, a neutral act of artmaking, or a negative rehashing of the past, I don't know. Tonight, it feels good. In the morning, it may feel bad. Either way, I suspect I will be exhausted tomorrow -- this is why I can't write for ten hours every day, because a vital aspect of it is drawn from my soul, not my head, and that takes more energy than any number of powerpoints and spreadsheets.

But there's no time to be exhausted; I have to be at the gym at ten to see Alyssa (we're assessing last month's 'progress', which is nonexistent because I've been eating like crap while trying to survive the final throes of the novel), and then I need to finish this thing so that I can pack and leave for LA on Friday. Goodnight!