Happiness...

I want to share something that surprised me. I went through the long form outline for A Place of Safety-Derry to streamline and trim. It was 29 chapters condensed over 16 pages and 8900 words long. I went over it in one swoop, today, also correcting typos...and in cutting it back I added 800 words and one page. My goal was to make it readable because I'm going looking for a mainstream publisher for this book, and it does flow better and gleans some of the emotional connections in the story. I feel it builds steadily to the bombing that nearly destroys Brendan, but is it too long for this sort of synopsis? I don't know, because...

When I hit the point where to be continued in book two is positioned, halfway down page 17...I started bawling. Lost it, completely. I'd never gone through the book completely in one go, before...it had always been in segments and chapters and bits & pieces until now...and when I finally got a full sense of the story, as it currently stands, suddenly I couldn't handle the fact that I wrote this.

I fucking wrote this!

A story about a boy, over six years of his life, and the way he is shaped and formed and made, in more than 580 double-spaced pages and nearly 133,000 words and years dancing with it and working around it and pushing through my doubts and concerns and fears...and I now had it in a state where it's close to being done. And I wrote it.

Me!

Fuck...I could not stop crying over it for five minutes, I was so fucking happy...and so fucking proud of myself. It's not perfect, yet; I need to do one more pass for clarity and consistency, but that's immaterial. I fucking wrote a fucking novel that I never thought I'd be able to write. And I am so fucking proud of me...and thankful Brendan never gave up on me.

Now I only have to make sure Books 2 and 3 match it.