It's finished! (sort of)

I've finally finished it! (kind of). I finished a draft of Pebbleman. After how many months? Let's not count them, shall we. But anyways, the last bit is written, finally got it all there. Now I just have to do, you know, the hard part. Make it good. Time to start editing it. And actually looking at it as a whole. This is the first story I've written out of sequence. There were good and bad points to that technique. One the one hand, you are writing stuff that you are basically inspired to write. You don't have to slog through one portion to get to the part you really want to write. On the other hand, it's harder to keep the whole of the story in mind, hard to see the overall arc when you are just doing it in essentially episodes. Plus, I constantly had to go back and check other parts to make sure they were internally consistent with each other, something that is not a problem when I write progressionally. On the other hand, doing bits and pieces allowed me to make some connections between different sections that probably would not have occurred otherwise (see the sneaking thing).

It's funny, one thing happened that I never would've predicted, the thing with Goffrey at Mrs. Fulmores house (I'm being purposefully vague to avoid spoiling things). It reminds me of something I learned in college. I read a story about a traveling salesman who meets up with some woman on a farm. I forget the specifics of it but the salesman ends up stealing the womans wooden leg or some other similar limb replacement. I don't even remember what the name of the story is (one of you literary types could probably tell me) but what I do remember is that the author said they didn't know the salesman was going to steal the leg until s/he wrote it. It was a complete surprise to them. That's what happened to me with the Goffrey thing. I was writing, then I wrote that bit, then went "wait a second, what did I just write?" I went back and read it, completely surprised, thinking "I didn't know he was going to do that." Then I thought about whether it was too cliche or not, but decided to stick with it. If it happened just like that, it must be ok. Times like that, I love writing.

Pebbleman, even at this rough stage, is the best thing I've written, but as I've stated before, that's not saying much. I do feel that the backstory parts I wrote in the first place are actually damn good. I'm proud of those. It's the rest of it that I'm worried about. But we'll see what I can do with the editing. See what goodness I can pull out of it.

I'll send out a couple of more invites for people to take a look. Those folks that expressed an interest or I missed in general before (i.e. suyapi, Noq, maybe my friend James). Everyone needs to remember this is just the first draft, lots of work yet to do. I've toyed with the idea of trying to publish it. Wouldn't know where to begin, but still, you never know.

Oh, and it should go without saying that if anyone steals anything from me I will track you down and kill you and I'm not even remotely joking. That would be beyond personal. I trust you guys. It's just, you know.