The First Verdicts & I'm FREE!!!!

After an afternoon of various music, peanut M & Ms, Combos & Coke, I stayed up all last night to finish the 3rd (and most difficult) draft of Carry Me Home, my short story. Yes, it was 6 AM when I finished, but that's totally ok because.....

IT'S DONE!

So then I had McD's for breakfast, sent the book to my beta reader and slept for 3 hours. When I woke up, I had the results from my beta reader.

For Carry Me Home:

"aside from all the typos and your notes (which I told her to ignore) it was great - i even cried at the end - good conflict- and u can feel the love" Whoohoo! Sounds good to me! One more read through (to fix those typos & notes) and this one will be ready for the publisher!

And since I didn't share her comments on the last novella I turned in, Simple Treasures, I've got those too:

"ahhhhhhhh  you've done it again - i couldn't stop reading till i was done - loved both characters and the story was excellent - however, i felt rushed - i know it's a short story but the beginning needed a lil more...." She went on to give me specifics about a couple of spots that needed fine-tuning, work I can definitely do if the publisher decides the story is worth working on. (Pretty please, with sugar on top!) So for my month of insanity, I think I fared pretty well as far as the writing goes. YAY, I can come out of my writing cave and slowly ease back into the land of the living! Over the last month, I've written close to 42,000 words & that's not including all the words I wrote then scrapped. I worked every waking moment for 5 weekends, and whenever I could during the 4 weeks in between. I missed out on a lot, skipped favorite TV shows, turned off emails with my writing loops all so I could push myself to a limit I've never done before. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Yep, if the career calls for it. But it will DEFINITELY not be a regular occurance in the house! I'm off to celebrate with another cup of tea and an email to my senior editor with my progress!