kasihya | Oh god I finished NtHS (Reply)

Thaaaaaaat was mentally exhausting. I stayed up until two, and woke up at eight, to finish it, and it's not quite done. There's a page at the end where the only writing there is dialogue because when I tried to fill in those gaps, it ended up making even less sense. I'm good at writing dialogue, and really bad at writing thoughts, and I had to get to class, so I just sent out the draft as-was with a note attached, saying 'Sorry about that, don't mind me' and now it is done and I don't even know what to do with myself. I really don't! I've never actually done this before. I mean, I've finished stories, yes! I've finished a bunch of stories, but they're always with characters that I planned to reuse. Like the one I did for Kai last workshop: that was a story about Kai, but it wasn't the only one I wanted to write, so his metaphorical book is still open. Karen, Matt, and Simon, that was their story. That was their purpose. I mean, there's always the King Arthur story, or something similar, but that's not THE story about them ... I don't know, I said I wanted to write that, and part of me does, but the better part of me is saying, 'No, that's not necessary. You've done the really important story for them, and going back would be retreading old ground.' It's a good feeling; it's new; and I finally understand what people say about feeling loss when they finish a novel. These characters have only been in existence for a couple of months, and I feel odd knowing that they're done. Of course there's still revision to be done, so it's not like I will never spend another moment inside Karen's head, but the really new stuff is done. (Unless there are serious structural issues that my class brings up tomorrow, in which case, disregard this message, haha.)

Oh god. If this is what it's like to finish a short story, I am very much not looking forwards to finishing my novel. Those dudes have been around for years.

Upside: I'm now more in the mood to write original fiction than I am fan fiction. I want to finish my fanfiction, too, because I've got quite a lot of it that's been shoved onto the backburner by school and which I want to finish (Hello, Martha Jones. Hello, Castiel-who-I-abandoned-mid-battle. I've missed you ladies.) but I also want to finish a substantial piece of original fiction.

Okay. Going off to write something new, and not think about the largely-unedited monstrosity that I just sent out to eighteen people.