2 December 2002

Well, that's a nice start to the day, the week, and the month.

I was actually feeling okay about things - not thrilled about having to get up and come to work, but y'know, them's the breaks. I was okay.

And then I got to work...

And Bert and Ernie were dead. The fish. Floating motionless at the top of their little tank, the water clouded and disgusting. The whole office smells.

What killed them? Damned if I know. Did they starve, going without food for four days? They've been fine over a regular weekend before. Is it because I cleaned out their tank before I left and didn't treat the water? I thought Bettas were tougher than that. Did the office get the heat turned off over the long weekend, and they died of cold? Could be.

I dunno. They're just dead. And now I need new fish.

Well, until this morning, I had a great holiday.

Thursday I watched most of the Macy's parade, and then we went over to my parents' for dinner, which was lovely, and then after K.T. and Kevin went home we went with my folks down to Norfolk to see Aida, which was good (but would have been better if they'd 1. mixed the sound so we could understand the singing and 2. made the cast dye and straighten their hair - I had some trouble believing in blonde, curly-haired Egyptians.)

Friday Matt and I ran our weekly errands and then went down to K.T.'s. Matt read comics while K.T. and I spent about half an hour hashing out some administrative stuff for the novel, and then we watched some Black Adder. After that, Matt and I met up with my parents again, and we went out to the Outback for Matt's birthday dinner.

Saturday Matt and I pretty much schlubbed around the house all day. It was nice. We got the Christmas tree up, and a few other decorations. We did a lot of reading (Matt's been reading It, and I'm slowly working my way through Red Dragon) and I did some writing.

Sunday I put up the outdoor lights, and I did some more writing and some more reading, and around 9:30...

I finished.

K.T. had finished about half an hour before me, so that meant that we were finished. The rough draft of the novel is done. Done.

Yes, I know that the hard part is still to come, but for now I'm very pleased and excited. We're about 10,000 words shy of 300,000 words (and I'm pretty sure that 10,000 can be recouped in stuff we wrote and then discarded).

We're going to do some re-organizing of our files, and then we will open up the site to anyone interested in reading and/or editing for us - look for that by the end of the week, or early next week.

We're thinking about what to do to celebrate our accomplishment. If nothing else, it will involve going out to dinner someplace very nice with Matt and Kevin, who have put up with this for the past months, and who are going to have to put up with the editing process for who knows how long.

But we're not going to start editing until the new year. Just because it's done, I think we're both going to do a one-time read-through, from start to finish, and then we're going to set it aside. It needs to lie fallow for a few weeks, so we can come to it relatively fresh. So any comments and suggestions that are made before then are going to be filed away, but not immediately acted on. Not even the obvious ones, like spelling errors and typos.

That doesn't mean we'll be doing nothing. The momentum is hard to pick up, so once we've got it, we need to keep it moving. So I think I'm going to start working on rough outlines for the other books, and we can decide which one will be next.

But for now... Just for now, for a day or two, if you don't mind too much, I'm going to just sit back and bask in the glow of accomplishment. The number of novels that I've started, and never finished...

It feels good. I feel good. Despite the lingering scent of dead fish and Lysol in my office.

--Liz