NJ writing retreat. Finished revision of Liminal Space and sent it to my agent just now, 90,183 words. I wrote a book! Yay! Yay?
Honestly, I feel a little queasy with anxiety — it’s incredibly nerve-wracking to hit ‘send,’ even though I know it may be weeks before Russ even gets a chance to read it. (Hopefully not months.) Maybe if I just keep my baby in my hands for a little longer, it will magically become the perfect novel? Somehow?
Well, too late. It’s sent now.
On to the next book, which will give me something else to worry about.
*****
I somehow have ended up in a situation this spring where I have FIVE separate book projects in a near-complete stage, it’s nuts, I honestly don’t know how I got myself into this state. It’s been making me super-anxious and stressed.
Bizarrely, I’m finishing at least three of them this week, I think.
• Liminal Space: Novel, completed and sent. Boom. (Started eight years ago, in 2014, but that was just before the cancer diagnosis, so I didn’t really work on it much for two years of treatment.)
• Vegan Serendib, cookbook, my part is done, I think, just waiting on my team to finish indexing and copyediting, hoping to finalize this coming week. (Started about two years ago, 2020.)
• Jump Space: Linked story mosaic, mostly done, need to implement some minor edits, then send to editor, hoping to do that on this retreat. (Started in 2011, technically, but finished the central piece of it in 2014 (The Stars Change novella), and then didn’t pick it up again until a few years ago, so I don’t think I can really say it took me 11 years to write. More like 6?)
• Indenture novel (first in series, hopefully): Have 50,000 words, I think, which gets us to the end of the novel, need to go back in and fill in lots that I skimmed past, but I think the next stage is to glance at it quickly, then send it to one of my writing workshops, and then I don’t need to think about it until we meet in May, so hoping to do that on this retreat. (No idea when I started it, and no energy to go dig that up now. I should figure it out at some point, though.)
• Cancer memoir: Need to take all the cancer log entries, put them in a Word file, and then read through and figure out what edits I might want to make. Don’t really have a good sense of how big a project that is, actually — might be four hours of work, might be four weeks…we’ll see. But the editor wants to bring it out in October, so I need to hustle a bit on this now… (Drafted over the course of treatment, mostly in 2014-2015, picking up again now.)