Last week, I finished a first draft of a BRAND NEW NOVEL!

First drafts are the toughest part of the process for me, wrung out after much grinding of teeth, head banging, whinging, and despair. Getting to that last paragraph, the final visual image, the last four words (words I’d scrawled in my notebook months earlier in a moment of inspiration, words my pen has been galloping toward all along), that accomplishment was momentous. And then, I converted the whole thing, all 90,000+ gloriously hideous words, into a Word document and emailed it off to my writing group.

Novel, the second. Draft, the first.

It was 3:30pm on Friday and I was JITTERY. Possibly because I’d been working on that last scene for six straight hours, which is not a practice I would recommend, but I was desperate to get the thing done and needs must. Or possibly because feeling feverish, twitchy, mildly panicked, and simultaneously relieved is par for the course at the close of a first draft. It’s been a while - five years - so I’ve forgotten.

There comes a point where a draft feels like a gremlin on your back, when you can’t wait to be rid of the thing, send it off to an editor or agent or fellow writers. Anywhere really, just offload the problem and have a reprieve. All Autumn, I’d been dreaming of Friday and a break from this damn book that is riddled with flaws I don’t know how to fix and all its accompanying anxiety. And finally, Friday came. The draft went off into the internet ether. Cue the celebratory weekend. Cue the homemade pizzas and the first Christmas party of the season, cue the gently falling snow out my picture window as I baked gingerbread cake with cream cheese icing. Cue books by the fire. So. Much. Reading.

Predictably by mid-day Saturday I was missing my book.