It’s Over, I Guess.

I don't know how it's over, but it is.

This is a look of disbelief from a man who fails to understand how it’s over. This morning, apparently, I finished the first draft of a new manuscript, SCAMBAIT, and I remain skeptical that I have, in fact, typed THE END.

My skepticism is well founded: I started writing this one on February 28th. That’s 72,000 words in 68 days, an achievement made all the more unusual considering this was the first manuscript I wrote without an outline since starting my very first manuscript way back in 2010.

And… it’s not bad? I mean, really, it’s hard to side-eye a seat-of-the-pants outpouring that’s in the spirit of THE BIG LEBOWSKI but it if were stirred up in a pot with David Mitchell’s Number:9:Dream and prepared by a chef who happens to share his namesake with Chuck Palahniuk. That’s a lot of mish-mashing, I know, but in the last year I’ve come to realize that’s kind of where I exist as a person and, as an extension, an author.

Despite where my published work may be shelved, I belong in the in-between, in the messy spaces that exist only at the edges of the genre-definition venn diagrams. I live there not because I’m special, but because that’s where I’m my most me, and writing from an authentic place has proven far more rewarding for me than writing from anywhere else.

For the first time in years, I’m feeling good, genuinely good about how I’m writing, and though this manuscript—like any in its position—still needs a lot of work, I’m already looking forward to getting back into it after I’ve let it ferment in the background for a while.

So, until I’m ready to retrieve it from the shelf in a few months, onward and upward. Write on and write well.