Here. Let me show you something that makes me very happy.

This weekend, about a year and a quarter from when we officially started it, K.T. and I finished editing the last chapter of the novel. (By the way, that's not two copies of the novel in that picture. It takes two of those binders to hold the whole thing.)

Oh, certainly, there's more to do. We didn't have a very good idea of what we were doing when we were editing the first several chapters, so we probably need to go through that bit again and smooth out the rough spots that are left. And I've been spotting typos caused by hasty changes to the files. That kind of thing.

And they say editing is never really done - there's always something you can do to make a story tighter or the writing better.

But we're through the first heavy, difficult wave. (Writing? Writing is easy. It's the editing that will slowly kill your soul.)

This week, we're not doing much of anything. K.T. has one chapter to make changes to and post, but that's just a matter of taking a couple of hours to do some tedious work. After that, well, Karen is going to get to town late Wednesday, and we'll both have family in from out of town over the weekend for our baby shower. The novel will be relegated to the back corner of our lives for a bit.

After this week... We'll each print out the edited manuscript and read through it to do that smoothing I mentioned a bit ago, and find those typos, and to make sure that the story hangs together. K.T. has a book with advice on how to submit proposals to publishing houses, so she's going to read that and write up our proposal.

Probably by the time that's done, I'll be either about to have my baby or else recovering from having the baby. K.T. will start the submissions process before she gets ready to have her baby.

By which time the holidays will be looming. So although we're both eager to get back to writing, and we'll both probably do a little, we won't officially start working on the next book until next year. Hopefully by that time, we'll have partially settled into our parenting roles and will have an idea what kind of writing schedule is even remotely reasonable.

But it feels so good to be done with this step.

While K.T. and I were editing, Kevin came up to Williamsburg to help Matt paint the nursery. It turns out that I should've insisted on that second gallon of paint, after all - they were both running low on paint and getting tired by the time they got to the north wall, and there are places where the paint is a little thin.

So on Tuesday, Matt's going to go back to the paint store and get another gallon mixed up, and come home and paint. (Or maybe we'll get the paint today and he'll paint tomorrow. Something like that.) That will give it Wednesday to dry, and Thursday evening we'll pick up the drop cloths and clean up the couple of little spatters that got on the window, and move the furniture into place... And hopefully, by Friday, the nursery will be - well, not finished, but finished enough that the baby could move in, anyway.

Finished enough for me to take pictures.

The Lamaze instructor wasn't nearly as much of a fruitbat last night, for which I am grateful. We watched the first half of a video describing various stages of labor, and went through some pain-relief techniques and more relaxation exercises, but those were actually kind of fun.

No homework, this week, too.

Well, not for me. Matt has homework. He's supposed to catch me sleeping and count how many breaths I take in a minute. And then surreptitiously count how many breaths I take when I'm awake and at rest. Shouldn't be too hard. I'm sleeping or resting just about every minute we're home together.

Does it really have to be Monday now?

Durnit...

--Liz