Three Cheers And A Tigger For Me!

Yesterday (4/18) at 7:18p, I finished the initial draft of my novel "Line 21".

For the time being, it clocks in at 142 pages and 69,313 gut-wrenching (at least for me) words.

A brief recap as well as a brief synopsis is now in order.

The recap:

On Super Bowl Sunday (2/7), I came up with the basic idea of writing about a woman who was in debt to a loan shark and the only way that she could earn the amount of money that she needed in the short time frame she had to work with, was to get involved in making adult movies. For the next seventy-one days, I worked on this story, after work and on the weekends. Some days, I cranked out as little as 500 words, and on some days I cranked out as much as 3,000 words. The end result was a completed manuscript that rivaled my original 90,000 word mess that was my first self-pubbed book.

The super brief synopsis:

Jeannie fell behind on her loan payments to her friendly neighborhood money lender. After having a short, but heartfelt, phone conversation with her uncle, she was given exactly five days to come up with two thousand dollars so as to get herself current with loan. After running into Ken Epee at the park and having a brief conversation with him, she decided to take him up on his offer of working in the adult movie industry.

The interesting twist:

I decided from word one to add a touch of fantasy to the mix, by having Jeannie talk to and live with, a symbiont. I also decided to have this symbiont, who goes by the name of Aissa (pronounced 'Eye-sha'), to become an active participant in Jeannie's adventures with the adult movie industry as well.

The plots:

I got temporarily lost a couple of times with the plot lines while writing this story, but I was able to find all of them before I finished. They are as follows:

1} Jeannie participating in a video shoot, along with several different tangents that sprang from the video shoot.
2} Her day-to-day/hour-to-hour dealings with her symbiont, Aissa.
3} The transformation of Aissa from a symbiont to a semi-real person.
4} Jeannie's boyfriend Geoff.

Those are the four major plot lines in the book. Like I've mentioned previously, I do like a challenge, and weaving together four distinct plot lines is about as challenging as one can get.

So again, three cheers and a tigger for me, for I have finally put this bad boy to bed.

Up next will be the all important yet incredibly dreaded "E" word.

Editing.

But more on that later. Right now, I just want to enjoy the moment of actually writing a book, from scratch (which is much different than writing a short story from scratch), starting with the opening sentence of "I need an extension" and finishing with the last sentence of "Lisa hung up and just before she dialed nine-one-one, she said, 'It sucks to be you." and all the other 69, 291 words in between.