No Small Feat

It's a great big feat! Crikey, look at the size of 'im!

Earlier this week, I reached a milestone. I finished my first novel. Wow. I still feel weird saying that. I write novels? Since when?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I've created a masterpiece just yet. In fact, I've been doing a lot more learning that masterpiece creating. Writing a book is an enormous and involved task. A novel is not just a really long paper. Way more sophistication and depth is required in a novel than in a paper, and it's by no means easy. I'm learning as I go how to make characters that are realistic, interesting, and worth reading. I'm learning the importance of various elements of story line. I'm learning why certain techniques that author's use are important.

Nonetheless, I wrote a book.

It's been a heavy investment of time, thought, and sometimes even emotion. I've spent almost a year now planning, writing, and rewriting my story, and I'm just getting warmed up. I've loved every bit of it, though. I'll often be sitting in class or doing something else and suddenly I realize I'm thinking about my story world, considering possible future plot points or character traits that I want to tweak. Or I'll see something that will spark a really cool idea for a setting. I really enjoy getting to create a world in which I can make anything happen.

For now, though, I'm going to be spending a while going back through with successively finer combs, cleaning and polishing and changing and doing all those other edit-y sort of things to my book. In the end, I'd like to submit it to an agent and see if I can get myself published, as I realized a while back that that is what I'd really like to do with my life.

Here's hoping it goes well.