Saturday, January 27, 2007

The End

Lovely words, don't you think?

Well, I finally wrote them on the middle of page 395 of Chapter 30 of Starletta's Kitchen. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hold that glass of champagne aloft and toast with me....

Now begins the task I'm actually looking forward to: revision. (I'm also dreading it, too, if that makes sense.) The manuscript needs so very much work, but I'm looking forward to it. Getting the words onto the page--the first draft--is the harder part, for me.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations. I should have been doing that about now with my novel, however, I have odd conflicts in life.

First there's work, which has me typically working ten hour days. I've taken to trying to get in some writing during lunch, which I think I'm going to expand to an hour to make that time a bit more productive that way.

Then there's my writing group. I realized in December that there was nothing more to be gained from showing them the current draft of the novel. I need to finish it and show them the next draft. But we're down to three people in the group, and if I stop bringing in new writing, I feel like I'll be letting them down: Part of the function of the writing group is to create peer pressure to get things written. So I've been doing short stories. I'm finding two things: First, I'm a much more natural short story writer than novelist, partly, I think, because I feel more free to use the first person in that format (maintaining a first person voice for 65,000+ words is a daunting process. Doing it for 3000-6500 words, not a problem). Second, trying to write a new short story every two weeks doesn't leave a lot of time for writing the novel.

But my last short story ended up at the long side of short (I typically had been bringing a 3000 word chapter each session into writing group), so I can split this one into two sessions' worth of meetings and get a bit more novel time for the next couple weeks.

Anonymous said...

Congrats! That is a wonderful event!

My new year's resolution is to finish my first draft. *fingers crossed*

I'll raise a glass to you from here on the Front Range.

Anonymous said...

Bravo, Barbara!
A bottle of glorious red Chanel nail color from me, to toast a very special lady, writer, inspirer and tutor!

Anonymous said...

hooray! congratulations!

Anonymous said...

CONGRATULATIONS!! You da bomb!!

Robin L. said...

Congratulations!!! I've been listening to you all you and cheering for you to get your novel out there. YAY!!!