I just finished a writing project.
On the one hand, that should be nothing, considering I’ve now written a new story every week for the last fifteen or so weeks. But this was a bit different, in that it was longer and more complex than a flash story, it was written for a specific market in which I’m very invested, and it was in some ways a proof of concept for another, larger project.
I wrote it, the rewrote it, then sent it to beta readers, then rewrote parts of it based on their advice and suggestions (thanks Elizabeth and Shauna!), then edited it twice more to make sure it didn’t exceed the permitted word limit.
Then just for good measure I spent an hour pacing around reading the story out loud to myself. It’s a great way of catching invisible typos like missing plurals and punctuation, sentences that don’t include verbs, and discovering that your made-up fantasy words are unpronounceable gibberish.
There’s no feeling quite like drawing a line under a writing project and saying “This is as done as it can be”. Usually that feeling is dread, because you’re about to send your precious story out in the world – what if it’s a steaming load of horse dung? What if it makes not one lick of sense? Or is boring? Or just, in some undefinable way, sucks?
But along with the dread comes a delicious sense of accomplishment. It’s done, it’s done, and now the question of whether it’s any good is, at least for the moment, out of my hands.
Now I think I need a drink. (But only a quick one, because the next project is waiting, and the ones after that)
