It happened on Friday, September 2nd, 2005, at 3:21 PM at a corner table in the Starbucks on Bear Valley Road in Victorville, California. On the overhead sound system, one of two songs was playing -- I'm not sure of the timing. It was either the Old 97s song "Salome," or Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)." Either one's fine, really. I finished the first draft of my first novel. Holy crap. It only took 570 days, start to finish, to write this complete edition of the story I started back in 1998, in the Sovereign Serials webzine. At 58,305 words, that's a miserable 102 words per day, which is just horrible. The next one's gotta be faster... I plan on making the next one my National Novel Writing Month project! Can you believe I finished a fucking book? Of course, I have to do an edit, and some fact-checking, and some clean up and tightening. I give myself a couple of weeks for that. But it's done. I've written a book. It's the first time I've ever finished something on this scale. Until now, they've all been in my head. When I finished, sitting in the…

I just wanted to say that today, July 31st, 2005, at around 6:50 in the evening, I passed the fifty thousand word mark in Brave Men Run. I've never written anything this long. It's going to be finished soon. I'm happy!

My, that's a provocative title, no? Well, it's nothing like that... it's simply that I'm finally getting back to finishing my novel, Brave Men Run. See, July has been just awful when it came to writing. There was just too much pressure from the Cursed Day Job, too many outside things taking not just my time but, more importantly, my energy. Today, a few days before the end of the month and more than thirty days since I've written a word of the book, I'm just starting to feel halfway normal. Yesterday I dipped into the book and read the last few scenes. And I felt like I could get back to it. I felt the trepidation slipping away, and started to hear my characters speak again. Trepidation? Yep. See, I'm in the last third... maybe the last quarter... of a piece of work that's been building in me for better than fifteen years. Now, I don't say that to create an inflated sense of the book's literary merit -- this is a light piece of science fiction, a coming of age story with a helping of innocence lost, not The Remembrance of Things Past. But yeah, I feel a…

Oy, right now, mostly ebb. I'm sitting here knowing that I should be writing, it's the time of day, the hour I reserve, when I should be working on Brave Men Run. That takes some energy, though, especially since I'm in the last third of the book and things are cooking... it's physically draining to write this part of the book, at least it is if I intend to do it right. And I intend to do it right. It's tough to find the energy to do the things I want to do... this is an old song I'm singing, I know, but it's a melody that keeps getting stuck in my head! I know I can't up and quit my job, and if I did, I'd have to replace it with another one, right? There's no living off of my art, not yet, not for me. So I have to find the energy. Right now, I don't have it. So I sit and blog to you, dear reader(s), and when I'm done with this and the time is gone, I'll be a little frustrated and feel the pressure of time and an empty legacy on the back of my…