I'm sitting at my desk this morning, with two hours to spare before I head to work and two chapters left to write and I'm blanking. What if this whole thing sucks? What if I'm nothing but a hack, a fraud? What if I'm just not good enough?

You know the feeling.

But then I stumbled across this blog post:

Write Crap by Julie Cohen

It's great advice. Probably the best advice for a writer. I have a similar saying scrawled on my white board:

Give yourself permission to write the worst CRAP in the world.

It's freeing to not worry about how good your words are. To just get the story down.

So, this morning, I am going to take this advice to heart. I am going to write CRAP. And I hope you all do the same.

So after nearly seven months of slaving over mediocre words and underdeveloped characters, hiding from scary scenes and pathetic prose...after months and months of telling myself I was no good, and I would never, ever finish this book, yesterday at about 1:27pm,

I

FINISHED

MY

FIRST

DRAFT

!!!!!!!

And this is how it felt:

And I found this picture in a google search for "freedom." I thought it was an interesting representation of the writing life. The chains represent the burning drive to write that we can't escape and the butterfly is the something beautiful that comes out of it.

I'm going to spend the rest of my day relaxing and reveling in the knowledge that all those torturous months paid off. Then, I'm going to do a quick run-through edit before I set it aside for a while. I have some continuity issues that Dana noticed when she read the first few chapters. Mari's best friend, for example, has four kids in one paragraph and three in the next. And then she's back to four three pages later. And Mari's relationship with her ex lasted somewhere between five and six years -- it seems to vary from page to page. Lots of work ahead of me. But I guess that's what happens when you write your first fifty thousand words in thirty days, huh?

I hope everyone has a marvelous Sunday -- I know I will!