So I’ve just finished writing this 15,000 word story, and you’ll probably never read it. I’m extremely protective of my writing, you see, and it bothers me to no end that somewhere on the Internet right now, there is still a copy of the very first fanfic I ever wrote. No, I’m not giving you a link.
I would much rather boast about the great accomplishment of completing a 15,000 word story than actually show you the story, at least right now, because this way you can say, “Hey, great job!” without any caveats. A few of my friends have seen bits of it, and one has given me incredibly useful criticism over the course of writing it–most of which happened in the last week. Yay for being unemployed. Aaron has expressed an interest in seeing it, and perhaps someday he will. After I revise the hell out of it, because even after working on it for at least two hours every day for the past five days, it is still very much a first draft, and that kind of weirds me out.
When I write, I edit at the same time. When I type those last words, I am done. That’s always how it went in college, and I BSed my way through plenty of English classes without changing my methods, so I figured it would serve me pretty well out in the real world. And I guess in a way it has, because I haven’t actually written anything since graduating. I’ve gotten one or two days into NaNoWriMo several times before remembering why I never finish NaNoWriMo, I’ve started an expansive back-story for my steampunk roleplaying character, I’ve scribbled a few ideas and lines of dialogue, and I have about a dozen stories in various stages of visualization locked up in my brain, but this is the first thing I’ve actually finished since college. And it feels amazing, and I’m going to bask in that feeling a while longer before I go showing it to the world.
I will, however, tell you my favorite bit of dialogue in the whole thing: “When you finish that, there are others on the bookshelf behind the painting of the tarantula lorry.” Yeah, I bet you really want to read it now. Well you can’t!