...AND IT'S DONE

For the time being, anyway.

There hasn't been much going on in the universe of satellite provider copy writing, so I've had plenty of time to work on those "Until My Heart Stops" entries. I've kept a pretty good pace since late summer and I'm actually really excited about the fact that I finished it.

Sort of.

I've been working on these stories for about 8 years now (I wrote the first one in February of 2005) and I've probably matured as a writer a little bit over that time. At least I hope I have. If I haven't, then I'm going to run into some serious problems over the next little while.

This was a huge undertaking and now that the first draft is done, I can move on to the second. I know that I need to let it sit for a while before taking it back out, but that's hard to do. I want to treat this as a real thing and give each character (i.e. real person) an actual voice and make it so it reads not so much like a collection of things that happened, but an actual narrative story broken up into segments. I started out just aping Get In The Van, but now I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid that.

There are a bunch of things I want to accomplish with this and make it more of an autobiography of a ten-year stretch of my life. Those ten years weren't incredibly compelling, but they were a lot of fun and made for some great stories. I'm pretty excited to put it out into the world, but that's still a ways away.

There's rewrites, layouts, pictures and a better title in the future, but for now, it's done. It's a cool feeling to finish something this big, but it also feels a little strange. I kind of thought it would be one of those things I kept plugging away at but never actually got anywhere with.

Thank god for corporate desk jobs with downtime, right?