Shadows of Mystery

Quite the feeling has started to simmer within me as I round the home stretch of completing my thousands of words long book about my arid life getting drenched in a downpour as I lived on the road by bicycle from southern California to Seattle, San Francisco, and into Corvallis, Oregon.

My God, what a trip it all has been. Save the actual riding of a bicycle over 4,000 miles and handwriting the rough draft, and my mom can vouch for this, but the transcription of my second grade handwriting to Times New Roman type face: the venture, my dear, the journey.

What goes on from here is to keep myself in reins of not annoying my guest writers who are doing the fore and afterword, and being patient until I print the next draft on Monday. After that, I'll sit down an ideal reader, the one who I thought would like the book while I was writing it, and flesh that out with him (or her).

From there, I'll retouch according to our going over, and prepare a draft for the editor to fine tune with. Once that is all fixed, I'll have a final draft. Mind you, this is my first real book, so I am finding a process that works. Aside from itching, what has kept me busy in the meanwhile, is the writing of Clover, a novella that should have been written in 2011.

For that book, I'll have a more fluent process of finishing a book, propelling me further into the depths of a literary life. Long term, I would like to alternate from a fiction story to non (unless God intercedes), and I don't care about getting rich, famous, &c. from that (but, by God, would that be cool); I would like to be good at telling stories for the triumphant task of making a movie.