It’s done.
The final edit on Songs, that is. I should be relieved, elated, but I’m not. It feels like an anticlimax (there’s that word again). I was expecting some great rush of triumph as I hit the final full stop and clicked “Save”. Instead all I got was “Jeez, is that the time?”
So what am I going to do with my evenings and weekends now? I have been living and breathing this book for the last year; my husband looks up when I enter the room and asks “Who are you again?”
But that’s me. When I’m writing, I am totally immersed in it, saturated by it. I think about it on the loo, in the bath, on the train, in the five minutes between phone calls at work when I really should be digesting the latest epistle from HMRC. Now that it’s done, I find myself vaguely bereft.
My reading has been sadly neglected. Richard K Morgan and Joe Abercrombie stare reproachfully at me from the shelves where their new books have been sitting, unopened, since I bought them the day they came out. Unread books in this house are an Abomination, and I have two dozen Abominations in the study. I’m afraid to go in there.
So I’ve started querying agents. I’ve been writing stories since I could write, pretty much. Started aiming at novel-length fiction when I was a teenager. I read once that the first million words is just practice and if that’s the case, I’ve served my apprenticeship and then some. Let’s see if we can’t make all this hard work worthwhile.
