This morning at 7:15 AM, I completed the first draft of my most recent novel, currently titled The Unexplored Territory.  Huzzah!  This will not be the final title.  I just can’t come up with a better one.

In a couple of weeks, I will do a first edit as I have previously noted, but I need a break from the story right now.  In the last 12 days, I averaged almost 2000 words a day, with a high over 3300 words.  Not bad considering I also work a very full time job and and two little ones running around being the joy of my life and all.  I was really cranking on it, and it took a bit of a toll on my sanity.  I love the story, and hope that will last through the next few months as I edit and polish it.  But driving that hard on a story means I gave up reading for fun, watched only a couple of movies, and if I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about it, there was no way my mind would shut off.

Tomorrow, or maybe tonight if I get ambitious, I am going to dive back into The Forgotten Road.  I hope to have that edit done by the end of next week.

Last weekend I hung out for a while with another author named Mark Teppo while our children (who are friends) had a play date.  We talked a lot about writing and the impact of writing on our lives, and on our pocketbook.  Mark said that it was probably too late for him to warn me off of writing as a career choice because I’d already been bitten by the bug.  I came to realize about a year and a half ago that I would probably not make any money doing it.  But it was interesting that I thought about that statement quite a bit this week as this story was coming to an end. 

Even if I don’t make a dime from these novels that I have written, I don’t know that I could stop writing.  If I rode the train to work every day, and did nothing but sleep or read, the commute would kill me.  But even more than that, I know I couldn’t go back to watching TV for 4 hours a day, or playing video games until all hours of the night.  The act of writing, the creating the story, even if it is for my own enjoyment and if no one else ever reads it, has really become an end unto itself.  When I started the final, climactic scene of The Unexplored Territory, I knew what had to happen, but I didn’t know exactly how it would happen, or how the characters would respond.  The final outcome absolutely floored me.  The adrenaline rush had my heart pounding, and I worked up a sweat while writing it.  I hope the readers have the same feeling when they read it.  Regardless, I really enjoyed these last two weeks, because the writing experience was so thrilling.

To celebrate the completion of the novel, I bought a new recliner for my office so I can write when my wife is watching Dancing With the Stars.  I also did most of my Christmas shopping, hung the outdoor Christmas lights, fixed the back gate, pruned the trees and bushes, added some hooks to the garage.  All stuff I have put off the last few weeks to write.

And while I was doing that, I think part of me was already starting to think about ‘What Ifs’ for my next book.  What if….