It is written!

Just a quick post to let you all know that my first Novel is offically written. Now starts the long editing process and search for an agent.

It finished out at 125,288 words and printed in double spacing she is 400 pages.

The title for now is "The Factory at the End of the World", however, Tonia already expressed a distaste for that title. I guess after a few of you read it you can give me feedback.

Thank you all for your support so far. I'm guessing I'll need it just as much in the days to come.

More Milestones and a Battle with Eleanor

Firstly, I want to mention that there have been great strides in the bathroom progress. We have now fully cement boarded the shower and the floor. Here are a couple pics:

And here is one showing the suburb curb work Tonia did on the shower pan. She formed it all by hand. It's at the very bottom of the picture.

In working on the bathroom we took the toilet off and found the shut-off to be very leaky. After keeping an ice-cream pail under it for a week or two and changing it daily we decided to change the shut-off. Now anyone who knows us, me especially, knows that plumbing is our Eleanor. We've had water dripping through our houses in the past and gone days with the main off trying to finish things. Tonia has gotten a lot braver about it, but I am still a bit leery. So since Tonia can be brave so could I.

Usually when I plumb I buy a dozen different pieces and plan on returning 11 of them because I can never get it right. Tonia bought 1 shut-off. I had Thursday and Friday off so I decided to help out and change the shut-off. It was a solder connection so there is plenty of room for error, but once on it would be on for good. By some miracle the shut-off attached on the first try. However, while heating the pipe to do the soldering I managed to apply the torch directly to my finger and Eleanor strikes again.

It's not much, but dang that plumbing anyway! However, the shut off went on like a champ!

Also on my day off I installed a new fixture in our stairwell. The fixture hanging there when we moved in was clearly original 70's cool.

After the adventure of getting the extension ladder into the house I got this lovely new fixture hanging. And a big thank you to Kelli Z. at the Lighthouse for helping Tonia find just the right fixture.

On the writing side of life, as I said I've had some time off from work so I've been spending a lot of time at Caribou Coffee and I have been averaging about 3000 words a day. Turning in those numbers I shot past my 96,000 word mark mentioned in my last post and I am now at 116,000. That being said, my bench mark was around 120,000 and following the plot that number will be fairly close to where the book ends.

I've killed off several of my main characters, a couple of which really affected me. I've never written about any one long enough to become attached to them. I've always read about authors talking about how hard it is to write about a character's death, and I've always thought it was a lot of crap, but it isn't. You really become fond of these people and the plot kind of makes its own turns and suddenly your favorites are lying on the ground, dead. It's kind of a drag.

Anyway, I've got a couple more days of vacation to burn up so I'll be taking off Thursday and Friday again. I figure the book will be done this week. I'm not going to lie; I'm a little freaked out. I've never finished a novel before and I'm afraid that there is only one in me. Nothing I've ever written before has flowed like this. What if it never does again? What if I am a one hit wonder? In addition to that I don't want to think about a next book while I'm still writing because I'm afraid I'll loose my way on this one.

Also, I'm really dreading editing over 300 pages of text. I'm afraid Dick and Alane will refuse the envelopes when I send pages to them for editing, if their still interested that is. Plus, this has been the focus of my mornings for the entirety of 2008. What'll I do now? I'm a little freaked out.

How I survived Hobbs without Calvin

This last week I traveled to Hobbs, NM for work. I was a little disturbed to find out before I left that the town had no coffee shops. I'm not talking about just chains. I mean no coffee shops at all! Now I've become fairly dependant on the coffee shop vibe to help me put down my daily words so I was worried about being able to get my word count in. Plus, I wake up at 4:30 every morning now. The idea of waking up that early and trying to write in my room at the Lea County Inn did not appeal.

When I arrived at my hotel in Hobbs I saw that it had been completely filled by me and a Mennonite group. All I saw throughout the hotel were long chin-strap beards on the guys and frumpy ladies with little hats covering their hair buns. They had completely taken over the breakfast room where I would normally use as a fall back to do some evening writing so I knew right off that was out. When I asked the guy at the desk if there was a Starbucks, Caribou, Dunn Brothers, Seattle's Best or any other coffee house in town he laughed and said the best coffee in town was McDonalds. That did not bode well for me.

Luckily there was one other chain in town that was 24 hours. IHOP. So every morning I cruised over to IHOP and drank a pot of their tolorable coffee and wrote. A side note about Hobbs, NM. This is a very blue collar town filled with oil men, farmers, and construction workers. Most of the inhabitants of the town worked in one of these fields all of which are booming. Retail and restaurants are hard up to find workers. So IHOP was only opened during the hours of 5 to 11 because of this shortage. The same to be said of WalMart. Every morning I was at IHOP I watched the one waitress run from table to table. I felt bad for the lady, but I was easy with my oatmeal and pot of coffee; I didn't take up much of her time.

In the evenings I wrote at a wine bar called the Pacific Rim and they, at least, served Starbucks coffee so that was good. I was able to write well every morning and every evening, but the vibe was just not there. On Wednesday morning, my last day in Hobbs the waitress must have been sick because IHOP didn't open at all. I spent an hour trying to find anywhere to go, but nothing was open. I ended up eating at McDonalds and choking on what had to be, the worst cup of coffee ever.

That afternoon I drove back to Lubbock, TX where I was flying out the next morning. On the way there I drove past this house, which, rumor has it is owned by a Mennonite. It's all brick, huge and looks to worth more than all the other houses in the area. It's neighbor is a rusted brown moble home.

Lubbock, two hours away and home of Texas Tech, has two Starbucks. As soon as I arrived I drove strait to one of them and promptly drank a cup of their finest brew and wrote up a storm. After that I had some supper at a Jason's Deli, which make a fantastic Rueben by the way, and found my way to the other Starbucks in Lubbock which happened to be on the Texas Tech campus. I was surrounded by college people who were all very friendly and I was in heaven.

All in all I was able to write around 10,000 words while on my adventure in the southwest. Not too shabby. Before I left I submitted two stories. One of which I sent to Weird Tales. I have sent quite a few stories to them, and keep getting rejected. I think I'll take the Heather Abraham approach to it. Just keep submitting until they publish me out of frustration.

And it is a momentous day today, as this morning at Caribou I past 95,000 words. This is officially the most words I've ever written for a single story. I hope to keep the flow going.

Not too much to post about the house this week. Tonia was busy with other things and I was gone, not that I contribute much. I'm certain there will something to report next week.