My status on Facebook was "Lori: just wrote the last word on page 340," but I'm not going to kid myself. It's exhilarating. It's momentous. But it's never the last word when I come to the end of a manuscript. I know in a few weeks I'll be digging through the pages, trying to find the diamonds and polish them up, tossing out the rubbish, and reconsidering altogether the entire last chapter.
There's something unsettling and, frankly, scary about finishing a first draft of a novel. I don't trust my judgment. I don't trust my words. You'd think writing the last page of a novel would be cause for a great celebration, and it will be, sometime in the future. I'm going to be calling my publisher soon, to tell her the good news, but I'm even hesitant to do that. The novel has just been born. There's still afterbirth clinging to its heels. I'm a little protective, still counting its fingers and toes.
I haven't written a post in the blog for over two months because I've been working on finishing the novel. I think my next post will be about the adventures on creating settings, which have thrown me for a few loops on this last novel.
