Friday, October 03, 2003
It's almost done now.
I finished Chapter Eleven yesterday, an emotionally and spiritually exhausting 2,603 words (the most I've ever written in one day, by about 600 words). There was a nosebleed in there somewhere, but mostly it's a blur. The end of this thing is sheer surreality, Alice's Adventures in Animéland, fuck, I don't know. Somewhere beautiful and terrible and bizzare that I've rarely ventured and never at novel length. Finishing that chapter was such a singular experience for me, as a writer. I don't think that a piece of fiction has ever left me feeling so entirely battered. When I was finally done, I let Jennifer print the pages and Spooky led to me to the shower and I stripped off the filthy clothes I'd been wearing for four days (me and the end of a novel is never a pretty, nor hygenic, sight) and she made me bathe. I stood in the shower and wept. I'm never comfortable putting such personal details in my blogger, but somehow that one moment was the perfect summation of the experience of writing Murder of Angels, so I'm making an exception.
I've often said that Threshold is the book that almost killed me, the one in which I got so entirely lost that I allowed myself to become very ill. I lost about twenty pounds towards the end of Threshold. I think I still have physical scars from that damned book. Murder of Angels has been kinder to my body, but harder on my mind. It's the novel that almost drove me (and everyone who has to live with and around me) on beyond insane.
After the shower, and a nap, and a tuna sandwich, I don't know, there was stuff, and later I watched a few minutes of Rebecca and then went to bed and read George R. R. Martin's "Nightflyers." I think I was asleep my 12:30, which is amazing in and of itself.
And now, all that's left me is the epilogue. A thousand words maybe, and lots and lots of polishing, and so on and so forth, but, for all intents and purposes, I will "finish" the novel today.
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