Pretty dang anticlimactic

I sat down at my desk this morning to get some drafting done. Pen, notebook, coffee, spare ink cartridges, the usual thing. And I decided to just keep going until I couldn't any more, because I haven't been getting around to drafting much since coming back to Norwich. And, much to my surprise, I finished the novel.

Cleaning off the desk, incidentally, was a contributing factor to 'not getting around to drafting much.'

Specifically, it's the novel that Ali Smith told me to go and write when I spoke with her in February of last year. Starting it was terrifying, as I hadn't written a novel since before starting uni and learning how to think in short story form - how do you fluff out a narrative that much? Somewhere in there (possibly around the end of the second black notebook) it stopped being intimidating. And I wish having written the last sentence felt momentous. But it doesn't, because all I've done is finally transcribe the end of a story I've already told myself over and over in different ways; the big payoff is that it's no longer cluttering up my head and I can think about other things. Like the degree I'm supposed to be getting.

Maybe being handed a bound proof copy of The Shore later this year will feel more like completion is supposed to.

It is 390 pages long, a bit over 100,000 words, drafted in at least nine different colors of ink (I'm easily entertained) and took six months of actual working time (most of the summer was spent skiving off and revising The Shore) and only four litres of gin. I'm not sure how much it weighs, but the notebooks were far easier to lug around than my computer, and also less prone to crashing, drop damage, and opportunistic theft. It's also quite easy to keep people from having a casual read, as I'm not letting those notebooks off my desk until they're transcribed and I doubt anyone can really read my handwriting.

This one, incidentally, also contains sex, drugs, and violence, but significantly less of all three than the previous book. It also has a single, consistent narrator, which is something most people seem to like. And now there's nothing to keep me from working on the degree novel except my crippling fear of failure and my advisor's insistence that I read books that make me cry.