Pardon me while I dance the happy dance: I know it’s not a pretty sight, but humor me, please.
This morning I finished the first draft for my Thrilling Tales story The Lair of the Clockwork Book.
You can continue to visualize the happy dance going on, here, though I honestly can’t recommend it. Now "finishing" the first draft really means that now I have to go through it and destroy everything that makes it a first draft. With a notable lack of mercy and steely determination, if not thews, for which, I’m afraid, it is too late to hope.
And it’s only once I’ve done those things that I’ll start the main event, which is working on the… um.. roughly 120 illustrations, which I’ll be doing a couple of dozen at a time.
In spite of my worries about my page count it’s come in at pretty much the right length: at two updates a week the story will run for about 60 weeks on the web and come in at just about the right number of pages for the print edition. So it’s all good.
Anyway, the short version (too late!) is: first draft done, lots of work to do, then pictures, which take forever, and, of course, happy dance. I’ve gotta quit doing that.