It’s finished!

That’s right: with a final word count of 168,316, the rough draft of The Lost Colony is now complete!

I was so busy today.  Tomorrow (or, more accurately, in eight hours) I fly out to Cairo for the Jordan study abroad.  Besides packing, I had final cleaning checks today.  And, if that wasn’t enough, my sister’s wedding reception was in the evening.  Ya salaam!

But in between all of that, I was able to “finish” this novel–I put “finish” in quotation marks because really the whole thing needs a major rewrite before it’s truly complete.  There are some inconsistencies, some points that need to be rewritten, some points that need to be cut, more build up for the ending, etc.

But as a rough draft, it is complete.  Though strangely, it doesn’t feel like it.

Either I’ve been too overwhelmed with other stuff going on, or I’ve been missing the forest for the trees, but it hasn’t really hit me that I’ve finished this novel.  Maybe in a few days, or in the fall when I pick it up to do the rewrite, it’ll hit me what I’ve done.  This is my fifth novel attempt (not counting the ones that didn’t make it to 10,000 words), and it’s the only one that I’ve finished.  So that counts for something.

I have a lot of other stories that I’m eager to work on, so I’m not going to do the rewrite just yet.  Better to let it rest for a while and pick it up with a fresh perspective anyways.  While I’m in Jordan, I’ll probably work on The Wormhole Paradigm and finish that one up.  I have a great opening line: “Earth was a ghost that haunted me.” Man, that just makes me want to write!

But for the near future, I probably won’t be writing much.  I have no idea how much internet access I’m going to have over the next few days.  From April 26th to May 5th, I’m going to be in Cairo, Egypt.  Once we get to Jordan and start our classes, I’ll have regular internet access at the University of Jordan, and I can probably find some internet cafes in between, but I can’t guarantee regular posts here.  We’ll see what happens.

Man, life is crazy.  I definitely don’t think this novel is good enough to be published–yet.  But it is an accomplishment that I did it–and made the deadline that I set way back in August.  Yay!