So there’s been an awful lot of silence here for a bit, for which I apologize. I’d love to set a goal to blog at least once a week as I start to gather steam. Right now, I must confess, all the steam I’ve managed to gather has been focused on finishing the first draft of my manuscript. 

I can proudly announce that my first draft is finished, and that I am now ready to move into the first editing phase of this process. My goal was to finish by July first and give myself well over a buffer of a month before my manuscript is due. 

As most of you have probably experienced in your life, however, life interfered — my youngest child was very sick, I had a family vacation during which I became really sick. Once I was home, I got even *more* sick and was down for the count for days. 

Once I managed to get out of bed and see straight, I booted up the old hunk of a machine I call my laptop (I generally blog and have fun on my Chromebook), and got to work. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I really developed my writing process through my involvement with NaNo. Here I learned to pound out 50k words in 30 days or less (my proudest and perhaps most painful accomplishment being writing that 50k in ten days when my oldest was 2 years old). 

I write fast and dirty, often with parenthetical notes that read something like: Cam said, (insert something witty here with a word that starts with a C that I can’t remember) or (use that word I like and can’t remember here). I generally write chronologically for reasons involving plot and character development I’ll be blogging about in the future. Writing this way often means I skip scenes I am not ready for at the time. I don’t go back to change spelling or grammatical errors at all because I drive forward so fast. 

All of which adds up to *Hot Mess* for a first draft. As I gird my loins in anticipation of diving in to this editing process (70k of *Hot Mess* feels terribly daunting), I ask for your positive juju vibes to help me along. I have a long family vacation the week before my manuscript is due (it is actually due the day I come home), so I’m going to hit the ground running as soon as the dust settles from an epic fandom journey I took this past weekend. 

I do hope to blog in this time, because I’d love to share my process and bits of how I developed these two boys I came to love so much. 

For now though, for those of you inclined to celebrate (it’s Wine O’Clock somewhere in the world), I hope you join me in raising a glass to myself in accomplishing something affirming, something I am so proud of: the completion of the first draft of the first published novel I’ve written.

Huzza!