The end at last, and coffee machine karma

I don't think it has really sunk in yet that I have finished the first draft, although I think once I've printed it out to read and I can see all the pages in front of me, that will change. I still need to do a read-through for anything glaring before I give it to my advisor, but I'm going to wait for a week or so and take a complete break.

Writer Timothy Hallinan's website has been invaluable to me in the last couple of weeks as I struggle to finish up. Now I'm living through this part of the process, as detailed in the section Finishing Up:

"There it is, your book. A nice, thick stack of pages, filled with the creations of your imagination. A whole world brought out of nothing and made real in the form of a ten-mile sentence. You should be genuinely, deeply, proud of yourself.

And then you should put it away.

Put it in a box. Stick the box in a drawer, where you can't see it. Put it on the shelf you use for stuff you only need twice a year. Leave it there, and take a vacation. Learn to draw, go camping, get pierced, research the knotted-string writing of the Incas. Go to coffee-houses and write descriptions of the faces you see. Jot down the things people say and work them into scenes, just for practice. Look at someone at the next table and invent a history for her. Write three pages every morning, as Julia Cameron suggests in The Vein of Gold, about anything and everything. Or use those pages to focus on your childhood, the shapes of hands, how to describe a smell. Come up with all the possible synonyms for “said” and put them on a list of words you don't want to use.

Make notes for your next project.

In your drawer or on that shelf, your manuscript is quietly cooling. Fat is congealing and rising to the surface. Dead dialog is beginning to smell bad. Imaginary blanks are appearing to indicate missing chunks of story. The great idea you forgot to write is gathering its strength so it can spring out at you when you open the box.

After a few weeks, open the box.

We write in heat, but there comes a time when we need to read coldly. This is it. Read with a pencil in your hand, preferably a red one. Be merciless. Circle or underline everything that doesn't work. If you know how to make it work, put a note in the margin, then and there. If whole scenes or sequences are flat, draw a line down the page next to the type. If you realize you left something out, note it in the margin, where you should have put it in the first place." - Timothy Hallinan

The main problems I faced these last few weeks were:
1) Fatigue. Was just plain sick of the whole thing, and wanted a break.
2) Resistance to finishing for a few reasons: fear of how I would feel once the first draft was done (purposeless, flat, empty? I didn't know, and none of those are true so far); fear of taking a break (I feel guilty when I'm not working, especially since I'm not in a paying job at the moment); fear of people's reactions to it once it was finished ("Oh no! This means it's actually going out into the world sometime! What if people don't like it?"); fear of my family's reaction ("Is this character meant to be me?" "No ..." "Are you kidding?"); doubt that I could effectively write about the subject ("who am I to try and write about this awful thing that so many people suffered through? What if I fail?"); and a whole host of other things.
3) Trying to do justice to such a painful and complex time. I really wanted to treat the time and place I was writing about with respect, and make them as powerful as they needed to be. The final chapters were set in an emotionally difficult situation, and I wanted to make sure I was sensitive to it.
4) Wrapping up all the storylines and loose ends effectively - a bit like juggling chainsaws.
5)Keeping it authentic and letting the book end the way it should end without falling into the 'short road home' trap.

My advisor and I had a conversation comparing writing a novel to giving birth to a child. I said, "Except the novel won't grow up and bring unsuitable boyfriends home."
"Or get acne," he said.
"Unless it's metaphorical acne."
"Like adverbs suddenly popping up in the text."
Well, now it's time to print my baby out (I don't think there's any way to make that a workable analogy without making it sound a little gross). LOML is going to do it for me at his work next week because our poor little printer can't take the strain.

In other news - I broke the coffee machine! I am sad. Just the lid hinge, but still. Only yesterday I was giving it a hug and saying, "I'm so glad I haven't broken you yet," and then SNAP. I hope it doesn't affect it too much. I would be heartbroken without my coffee machine. It has taught me a valuable lesson about tempting Fate, however - I am no longer going to say, "My God, I can't believe I've kept the goldfish alive this long."