First Draft Done! RAH!!!!

It's finally flippin' well finished!

Lordy, it's only taken me, what?

ALL MY LIFE

Fuck me, I cannot believe it. Sorry for the language, but it has been a long time coming. And do you know what? In true style, I wrote the last sentence, went to save it and for the first time, EVER, my laptop crashed. Yes. I am not making this up. It's like it KNEW. Cue long phone conversation to husband who is Oracle of All Things I.T. I was remarkably calm, in fact I was more worried that I wasn't going to be able to post my Novel Racers coffee morning tomorrow. I'm not sure why I was so calm, I guess I was in denial.

After much clicking on stuff that wouldn't work and monitoring CPU usage and trying to shut random things down, we resorted to shutting everything down and crossing our fingers.

I fired the thing up again, and who would have guessed it? It's intact. Thank you, Bill Gates. Thank you a lot.

I'm delirious - look, it's 130,000 sodding words long and it's taken a while...I can't wait to edit, I'm serious. Did I mention it was 130,000 words long? I'm going to take a scythe to it, I'm telling you. Whole characters are going to go (probably), whole scenes, maybe even a subplot. It's going to be 110,000 absolute max and as tight as a gnat's chuff.

I over-write. I'm going to deal with it. I just don't know any other way, yet.

Anyway, I am being remarkably restrained and having a wee snifter of Gewürztraminer, because it's all we have in the fridge, but tomorrow night there will be Champagne and smiles and laughter and just the slightest bit of regret...ahh...

Hurrrrrah!!!!!