Challenge Accepted

I finished a novella today.

SO excited...and out of it. This is definitely the sort of day where I am better off far away from motor vehicles, being responsible for small children, or working with anything flammable.

This is a project that I have been toying with, off and on, for three or four years. It's a sci-fi story, which has been a nice little break from my fantasy series. Hopefully it too will be the start of a series...which will either be awesome or very confusing for me.

Anyway, I've been working towards an open submission deadline for this Sunday for the past two months. I had to check my sent mail in gmail to figure out how long I've been seriously working on this thing. 2 months, almost to the day. 2 months and about 36000 words. That's not huge and I know there are plenty of writers who could write three times that. But I'm pretty psyched that this thing basically went from “Characters...IN SPACE!” to what (at the moment) seems like a decent story.

As I am sure you remember, I have kind of penchant for re-writing stuff. And I am ok with that. BUT I didn't have time to with this deadline. I did a lot of little rewrites along the way. Lots of scenes were altered, scrapped, added back in from a new POV, all kinds of things. However, as I hit about the last 3 chapters I started to have the uncomfortable feeling that I wanted to scrap the whole damn thing and start over again. However, instead of deciding to abandon my hopes of meeting the deadline in favor of a huge re-write I pushed myself to press on and finish the story that I had started.

I do like that perfectionist impulse because it does keep me working hard. BUT there is a time when you have to just...move on. Honestly? I suck at that. It's really hard for me to let something go, which I'm sure is part of why I second-guess myself and go back to the beginning and do things over. (The other part is the obnoxious voice in the back of my mind that tells me that I am a hack.)

I love days like today. Not only is it a great feeling to “finish” something for a little while, but it feels like I managed to push past my comfort zone a little bit. Time to rest tonight before prepping to meet the submission guidelines and hopefully send it off in the morning. Wish me luck!