Gosh, I'm just glad I can count that high.
I marked the occasion with a chin nip. My raggedy beard came off in tatters. "Good riddens, old fellow! You were worth the combing. I'll grow a replacement fellow here shortly, like a clone-you grown in a test tube, except out of my face..."
A lot of what I've completed up until this point—namely three other unpublished novel drafts—informs this moment for me. I know, from A Crow Over Altoona, that the work's just barely begun. That I'll likely shave off about a quarter of the first draft and rewrite another quarter.
I know from Meglipse that I'll probably embark on some grand methodical thematic transcendental understanding of the whole book with sticky notes and pointed comments in the sidebar galore. But they won't come to any practical use, except to make me feel intelligent and illustrious.
I know from The Grand Illusion that I'm going to have to rub out those things that sting too personal or therapeutic and rewrite them into something entertaining. For a real reader. For someone who would like to invest hours of their life in a world I've created. And even then, luck has it.
That said, feels good. Still boiling with ideas for The Vallen but that's good too. I'll pick the nits out of this ditty till the wolves come home and the owls roost in the barn. No worries at this point except that frantic little elf in my head going: This is entirely unpublishable. Why did I dedicate so much time and energy and thought into something so stupid? I'm embarrassed to the umpteenth degree of this joke of a book!
Shutter that little elf aside, gag him and hogtie him, and think about just the work to be done, will ye? No need for panicky castrations just yet.
And now I'm off thinking about what it would be like to be castrated...lovely.