Everest

It's already one in the afternoon, and I haven't done much in the way of my daily goals. I've managed to fill in four blocks for each set, and that feels really good. I started book two with two scenes that had only been pictures in my head, and they're now a little more fleshed out. They still feel awkward, but it's the raw draft. It's the time for the scenes to feel odd and awkward and not quite right. It will be worked out later, but for now the process has begun. But I haven't written a page since last night.

I've also managed to edit every day, but I'll admit that the first day wasn't too efficient. I wouldn't get as much done as I wanted to, despite aiming for ten pages. To combat this, I found a big paper clip, an every day I put ten pages together and aim to just edit those. I can edit more if I want, but ten pages is the bare minimum, and it works. It feels faster and more manageable. I still haven't started today, though. I do have ten pages set aside, so maybe I'll get to it.

So far today, all I've done is this post. I'm tired. I've had like five hours of sleep, and if I were a person who relied on the movement of the muses to make me work, I'd never get anything done. I'm jumpy, irritable, and frustrated. At the very least, I haven't gotten any requests for pointless tasks.

I don't ever want to get into the mindset, no matter what setbacks I have, that my work is pointless. It isn't. I will finish and publish this book, but I promise you it is seeming easier (more depressing, but easier) to just stop. To shove this book in a drawer for never.

My brother was talking about climbers on Everest who never make the summit bid. They work for years, training. Months, climbing the mountain. They spend money. They spend their time. And too many stand on the mountain, and the summit is within sight, and they can almost stand on the top of the world and look out and know that they have conquered the ice and the cold and the thin air.

And they quit. They stop. They make the choice that they cannot keep going. Physically they're fine. Mentally, they've allowed a mountain to psych them out and drive them back down at the moment when it's almost in their grasp.

The thought of that makes me sick inside.

It's not that I don't want to give up writing this book; it's that I can't. It drives me and has for more than ten years now. That hunger is there and it is never ever satiated, and it never should be. I want this too bad to be satisfied with turning back and saying "well, I made a good go of it."

I better get to work.

Hunger

I'm excited because I've reached the first peak in this stage of the novel, which involves editing. This was editing at its most basic form, correcting spelling errors and problems with capitalization and punctuation that resulted from me only typing fast without stopping to clean things up a bit. So that's done, and officially the book has 58,052 words.

It's one annoying peak, but there are a few more ahead. There's at least one more scene I need to write from scratch, and there's a lot of refining that needs going at the end. In my haste, those parts ended up choppy. Part of that is the main character and how she thinks. A lot of it isn't.

Maybe you've read a little about the iPhone's development history. The phone was almost done. They'd put the thing together. It was a phone, a nice, sleek, gorgeous Apple product that was, on the outside, a whole package.

On the inside, it didn't work.

Steve Jobs said, "We don't have a product yet."

Well, I don't have a book yet. There are almost 60,000 words of what is structured like a book. What looks like a manuscript. The manuscript contains a story. There's even a name, and I toy with cover design ideas in my head.

But I don't have a book yet.

I'm close, but one thing I won't do is publish now. It's not ready. There's stuff I need to say, and although I now have what I can call a rough draft, it needs to cook.

I'm pretty excited, though. The first draft is finished, and the story is cooking.

And, I must say, I'm pretty hungry.