The Day After

It felt amazing to wake up this morning and realize that I am finally completely done with my first book. It felt great when I originally finished writing it in 2004, and then in 2006 when I thought it was done and sent it to the copyright office, but now it feels REALLY done, and I feel whole within myself in a way that is awesome. I skimmed through it again last night just to make sure of the final manuscript, and there is nothing at all that I want to change. As soon as I finished that, I gave a copy to my housemate Ryan Wartena, a scientist, artist and all-around Renaissance Man who has been highly supportive of my books. He told me later that he read some of it out loud, and could tell that I had really strengthened it with my hard work editing it the last few months (he had read part of an earlier version so he had at least a little of a benchmark with which to compare it). He got excited about it originally because he said he could hear music in it, and said we should make that real by composing something around it. I was like, it's 150 pages long, good luck with that and let me know how it turns out, but I was doing research recently on the topic of troubabour poetry and music for my next book, and was reminded that very long epics in the Middle Ages were, in fact, sometimes set to music. They were easier to sing than to recite, and I had Gawain sing a little in this book when he got up to read an epic poem, so it's not as far-fetched as I thought when Ryan first mentioned it. Thinking about it makes me tired, though. I'll ponder it more, but later; for now, I'm just glad it is ready to put out as a stand-alone book. I also told my other housemate Evonne Heyning, an artist, Second Life developer, web guru and non-profit arts foundation officer, that I found absolutely nothing to change in my last two read-throughs of the book, and she said, "Good! It's done then." And it is. It should be live online tonight. The only remaining things will be to promote it and either print copies at some point in order to really self-publish it (complete with cover art commissioned by me from Osvaldo Valle, my amazing artist friend and web developer in New York City), or maybe get a publisher, whatever seems like the best course of action.