I finished, that’s how I did! 410 pages; 192,000 words; it’s done, pinned dead the page – well, that’s how it feels right now…

I’d have a glass of champagne, if this wasn’t a dry country. As it is, I’m going to take morbid pleasure in burying the baby for the next seven weeks – I’m not going to look at it again now until the new year. Once I’ve taken that good long break, it will be time to print it out for the first time (sorry, trees) and go through it line by line to make it pretty: catch the typos, straighten out inconsistencies, pluck out the cliches, beef up the flat bits, ruthlessly cut redundancies, and get it ready for its first wobbly steps out in the world ie my first reader.

That’s later. This week I’m going to loll around on the couch reading trashy books and eating chocolate (and tinker; I’ll tinker a little this week, I won’t be able to resist). I’ve got technical work, a bit of non-fiction stuff, and some editing to do, but no new fiction project thought up yet, so this is the last in this series for a while.

p.s. you know you’re in for a bad writing week when you get a rejection from a market you never submitted to, for a type of a story you’ve never written…weird.