Only Good News Can Cool My Desire

Here's a little Boss for you. Cracked recently taught me that this song was banned by the BBC and Clear Channel due to the conflict in Iraq and after 9/11, respectively. Neither I nor Cracked understands what this personal, crazy sexy song has to do with world conflict.

I post it here because, you see, I'm on fire. I got an acceptance on Friday, for an anthology related to women and body image. Although I'm really excited, because this project is such a wonderful, necessary idea, I don't want to yell and scream too much about it. I've known anthologies not to pan out; my work was accepted on spec, on a paragraph rather than the full piece; and I'm to be paired with an artist (in theory), which I freely admit might make it all go wrong (fault mine). If it does pan out, I will be thrilled and honored to be a part of the project.

But that's not the only reason for the burnination. I finished the first draft of KUFC. Finished it. Done. Finito.

I wrote the last chapter on Friday, and then on Saturday I rewrote the prologue completely. I originally wrote that prologue last summer, and I made it all fancy and beautiful, with embroidered prose. But the rest of the book didn't get written like that, and some other aspects of the book changed along the way from what I'd written in the prologue, and two test readers didn't like it anyway, so I decided to redo it altogether once the whole draft was done. On a nice walk on Saturday, Matt compared the function of my prologue to a tutorial mission in a video game, which is an ideal analog. And that means I might have to rewrite it again and again, a bunch of different ways, to communicate everything I need to communicate so you're not jumping into the game without a clue about the mechanics.

But the point is, I'm done with the draft. I spent nearly all my waking hours on Sunday, from 10 AM to 9 PM, polishing it. I still have much more to do (as they say, writing is rewriting, much as I wish it weren't so), but there. It hovers at 92,500 words. I am dying for someone else to read it, because I am sofa king excited about Berra Thorntree and her death-defying adventures that I want to introduce her to other people, too. Of course it's not ready to go out yet, because Matt needs to tell me about the things I totally forgot to notice and it needs to sit for a while so my self-indulgence can be recognizable. But SOON. When I was done with the first read on Sunday night, though, I posted a remark to that effect on Facebook, and a bunch of people jumped in to like it and tell me they wanted to read it, which made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Matt claims to be excited to be the first other person to meet Berra, but I've been telling him repeatedly how much I look forward to him reading the thing for many weeks, so if I were him, I'd pretty much be playing along by now.

Anyway! Acceptance! Completion of fourth-or-potentially-fifth novel! BIG YAY!