Finished!

I just completed the first draft of The Librarian's Tale on the train this morning, having added another 10,000 words to the 50k I logged during NaNoWriMo. Whew! I forgot how much of a rush it is to actually slap "THE END" (or in my case, "TELOS", being the Ancient Greek geek that I am) on a finished manuscript. Even though I know this one's going to need a lot of work on the second pass, the plot ended up resolving itself a lot better than I had originally thought/worried/despaired.

So now it's back to "Number Two", which I suppose has become #3 in the grand order of things, with the result that my working title for it probably doesn't make much sense any more. So why don't we call it "I Can Live Without It", or ICLWI for short? I'm also in the process of doing a final edit for the short story I'm getting published (original title: "Amber"; new title: "Tomorrow Is Another Day"), as well as a new preliminary edit for another one of my shorts that the editor may also be interested in. I'd also like to write a few more short stories, now that I have a much better idea of how exactly you do such a thing.

That's the fiction front. As for non-fiction, I'm thinking about pitching a couple of possible library journal articles and working on a book query for a topic that I've been researching for several years now. We'll see how that takes shape in the new year. Right now I'm just pretty psyched to have gotten this far. I think as far as summing up how I feel, the Greek poet Cavafy put it best:

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritos retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."