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.