Rough evening. My heart is going a mile a minute, and it was doing that before I went for my evening row. Even that brief bit of exercise did little to ease my nerves, but it’s done. 6,252 words later, I’ve finished writing The Wanderer. I’ve only once before done a sprint to the finish longer than that, and it was for a book at the time I disliked as much as I do WAN. Of course, where that old work is a relic now, depressing but otherwise without note, WAN is a living part of my wider series, the 6th finished novel and the book at the heart of the timeline. And yet, I have made my decision that I will not upload the story to WattPad. When the time comes, I’ll make it a page on here, give that page or series of pages a password, and only give that out on request. For the foreseeable future at least that shouldn’t be an issue, as I don’t exactly have legions of readers.
I’ve got a long day of work ahead of me tomorrow, not least as I still need to finish all the work I meant to over the weekend. Most is done, but there’ll be an intense morning lying in wait for me. As such I’m off to bed as soon as this is done, but I need a minute or two to calm down first. When I finish a first draft of a normal novel, I feel a sense of elation, of accomplishment, of satisfaction even if not pride just yet, knowing all the editing that needs to occur. Even then there’s a little pride. Right now, I feel hollow and drained. The last 67 days writing this novel have been miserable, and I am putting off editing down the 91,239 words of soul destroying vulgarity as long as I can. I might even do a hands off edit and only do continuity tweaks. After all, ‘adverbs’ and ‘passive voice’ are the least of the abhorrences in that story.
I know I don;t have regular readers, but I just want to apologise for my one-note theme to the last couple months of posts. Rest assured, I will never write a story like this again, so you won’t have to listen to me whining about how much a book is crushing my spirits. Soon, normal service of me whining about other more mundane matters will return. Talk soon my imaginary readers.
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