The end is just the beginning...

I finished a novel. I finished a novel. I finished a novel. Yeah, no matter how I say it, it still doesn't seem real. To celebrate, I will now rock out to The Night at the Roxbury soundtrack.

*Sings, "What is loooove? Baby, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more."*

*head bob, spastic dancing ensues*

*coughs and looks around* I am so sorry you had to witness that.

I've claimed for six years that I'm "working on a novel," which mostly consisted of tinkering when the mood struck me to write and lots of conceptual conversations with dear friends. It was never anything serious that would bear any actual literary fruits. Two things kept me dabbling instead of really gaining any forward motion in the manuscript. Okay, so lots of things kept me from that, but we'll just concentrate on two for now.

First, I am not what one might call a disciplined person by nature. Unless you give me a deadline for something, I will procrastinate right on schedule. Not necessarily out of laziness, but unless something is in my face, I forget about it. I get distracted by all the trivial and big things in life and my writing always got booted to the end of the priority line. I was sick of this. I had a story that I wanted to tell. Characters that I wanted to introduce to the world. Like many authors say over and over again, if you're serious about your writing you've got to think about it like a job. Whether I'm in the mood to write is irrelevant. As one blogger I read said so aptly, "moods are for food and" ...playing Yahtzee. Right doesn't begin to describe what he was. Until I started thinking about my drafting, and then revising and editing, as a second job, I made no progress. I had to commit. If you want to write something as weighty as a novel, you have to really want it, because it consumes your life. You just cease to exist for a while. Ask my friends. By the way guys, I do exist again. I'll see you soon.

Second, I was terrified of finishing my book. It's so unthreatening to be "working on a novel." No one can really criticize an unfinished manuscript in a way that's devastating, because you can always fix it, you can always apply their criticisms in a constructive way that improves the story or the writing. Once you finish, however, it's done. It's out there. Your soul is out there to be tramped upon and kicked like a puppy in the rain. Now, I'm a critical person by nature. My students can attest to this as a strength, hopefully, that pushes them to reach the amazing potential I see inside them. My friends can attest to this as both good and incredibly annoying at times. Regardless of its application, my critical nature made me fear putting a finished product out there, because so much of who I am is found within the pages of this story and I really didn't want my soul to get the boot.

But somehow, through baby steps and a lot of focused determination and a lot of crying and screaming and threats of arson, I finished a novel, a 148,800 word novel. That's a lot of words. (Now, I'm picturing Alot of Words.) Writing this book was hilarious and fun and exhilarating at times and at times I thought it might kill me and how could I ever be so arrogant as to think I could ever be an author when my writing is so horrible and I am lower than the bacteria in pond scum and someone please take my computer away before I delete everything I've ever written. Whew. Luckily, I have a brilliant support network who talked me off the ledge and metaphorically stole my lighter fluid and matches when necessary.

Several people have asked me what this novel is about and honestly, I have a really hard time condensing it into a synopsis that doesn't sound trite or contain spoilers. The most I can tell you is that this is a book about broken, flawed people who've experienced tragedy and made some really big mistakes and the journey they take to find redemption, themselves, and each other. There's much more going on than just that, but that's really the heart of Shatter. Which should tell you a lot about me.

Despite the fact that I just finished a novel, Shatter is just the beginning. I have two more books in the trilogy to write, Render and Forge. I'm already 40k words into Render, but for now I'm taking the week off and getting reacquainted with my DVR and diving head first into the queue of books that have piled up in the last few months. So I hope you'll consider reading Shatter to get to know the amazing, dynamic characters I've shared my brain with for the last six years.