Drying the Wings

I feel like I’m out of the chrysalis, sunning my wings. New hair, new shoes, fitting into clothes I haven’t fit into in at least a decade…I’m not quite ready to fly yet, but I’m getting used to the bright colors and the sunshine. Admiring those wings, and stretching them. We’ll see if they carry me in a little bit. Right now it’s enough that they’re there.

I was supposed to take the past week and a half as a celebration of just how far I’ve come. Instead, it feels like I accelerated the change to warp speed. I’m really looking forward to after the turn of the year, when everything should calm down into a reasonable routine.

So, the celebrating…not so much. But the feeling good, and feeling like I can handle things? Yes. And opening up the zero draft I’m revising and finding out that, gee, it doesn’t suck as much as I thought it would?

Oh yeah. That’s awesome.

I hit this point every time I revise a zero draft. The book isn’t as bad and ugly and messy and nasty as I thought. We might actually have something here…got to fix that, and fix this…oh, this will work better like that, which will make that have to work like this… Next comes the Book That Will Not Die, after I get an edit letter or two…

…but I can let that happen when it happens. In the meantime, I can admire my wings. They’re tissue-thin, of course.

But if I hadn’t struggled out of the chrysalis, I wouldn’t be feeling the sun on them now.

Over and out.

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