The Book is done

As I sit at home sick, eating tofita because I can't find mamba and drinking coke because I can't find Gatorade, it occurs to me that I haven't shared some important news. 

It's about that book. The one that started out as five thousand well paced words. That was neglected for almost a week of November. That book that was finally finished in some all night delirium in the middle of December. In proper Sumeera fashion, it was finished after the deadline. But it's done.

And by done, I mean I have surpassed the 50,000 words we were supposed to write and have most, if not all, of the plot and story down.

I haven't sat down and read the whole thing. At times I'll open up the document and read a few pages here and there. I stare at them, not sure who wrote them. Other pages stick out to me. I can remember exactly where I was sitting, the person it was that walked by and inspired that character or emotion. 

Do I love my book? I'm not sure. I love it because its my first. I love it because there are things in there that I really wanted to say and there are stories that I really wanted to tell. I love it because one of the characters was so hard to write and I stuck with her, trying to see the world as she would see it. I tried to write about her life tenderly even though I thought the life she chose was stupid. Do I love my book? In a slightly dysfunctional love kind of a way, I do. I really love it.

We got an email from Nano titled "An Year in Revisonland" encouraging us to start thinking about going back to our books. It said, "Because if our novels tumbled from our imaginations in tidy, ready-for-the-bookstores packages, we would be denied one of the greatest pleasures and challenges on the planet: Novel revision. Through rewriting, we get the opportunity to take the best parts of our books and build a truly awesome story around them. In doing so, we also get to improve our shortcomings as writers, and take November's sparky fling and turn it into something fiery and enduring."