My word. i’m not sure – it is, after all, just a first draft – but I think I finished my novel. Bones of the Angel. The ending sort of crystallized in my mind this morning and I sat down with the laptop, and thirty pages later I’d wrapped it all up.
The ending is, of course, still pretty rough, but what’s amazing is that the whole thing feels pretty much like it was cut from whole cloth. That’s a serious achievement when you consider that I started this thing seven years ago, while I was still at Kenyon. So, yes. Seven years and 220 pages later, I have a novel. A short novel, sure, clocking in at around 56,500 words, but a novel nevertheless. I’m sure I could flesh it out to 250-300 pages if I needed to, but right now I’m adhering to the ‘write tight’ idea.
This feels so weird. When I was a kid I expected that completing a novel would be accompanied by fireworks and a parade, or something along those lines. Instead, when I finished my novel I took myself out for a maple walnut ice cream cone at J.P. Licks in Davis Square and a small mocha at Someday Cafe, stuck my nose in Macintyre and Moore’s (a great used bookstore here) without buying anything, and then walked home in the spitting rain.
Now I guess I’ll set about with the revisions, send out some copies to friends for some constructive criticism, and then maybe out to some real writers I know for the mean stuff. The book is odd – it’s not designed to be literary at all, more like one step above Clive Cussler, somewhere around the Dan Brown school of writing (*wince*). It alternates between being kind of funny and something of a thriller, with dashes of the supernatural and bits of just growing up in a small town. It’s about love and loss and family, and also about explosions and sex and the dead. (And the dead, not with the dead. Pervs.) It’d be a bizarre cross between a Hollywood blockbuster and an art house film, if a movie were to be made out of it. It’s got too many characters and a not clearly-enough defined villain and weird poetic switches in POV and all of that, but if nothing else it’s really, wholly and completely me. I think I might have pulled off what every writer sets out to do – write the book that they so desperately want to buy when they walk into a Barnes and Noble. I reread it this weekend and really enjoyed it, but then it’s mine. And it’s done. Done done done.
Well. The first draft, anyway.
Still. Woo!