My hands and forearms are tingling and aching a bit; my brain is tired, fuzzy but pleased.

I finally finished the first draft of the short-story-turned-novelette that I mentioned here! Word count: almost 14,000. Ooops. The word count will most likely go down a bit during the editing process, because there’s loose stuff and fluff in this draft (as there always is in my zero/first drafts), but still: definitely a novelette here. I’m going to let it sit for a while – I’ll possibly take in the rest of the first draft to my writing group (in parts, obviously), although I dunno, I may want to tinker with it first. The end is much rougher than the start.

Anyway, I’ve been working on this thing on and off since May, so I’m really glad the first phase is done now. It’s got a beginning, middle and end! Huzzah! I love the feeling of finishing a story – it happens so rarely that it’s always a special event. I’ve got a bad habit of leaving stuff unfinished, especially when it comes to prose. I’m trying to work on changing that habit. A crappy but finished draft is better than a crappy unfinished one!

Tomorrow after work: submitting stuff to various places. It’s been too long since I did a proper batch of submitting, so I’m going to bite the bullet. Will also try to edit a couple of stories that are almost ready for the submission cycle.