Rough Draft

Setting the scene:

• Friday evening.

• One week after leaving my job.

• Ignoring the Christmas packing and cleaning to be done.

• Cinnamon tea with upstate honey in a Nancy Drew mug.

• Dance Fever (Live at Madison Square Garden) by Florence and the Machine in my enormous headphones.

• Christmas lights in the window, desk light brightening one corner of my bedroom.

And that’s all she wrote. Quite literally.

(The final will not be almost 97k words, I promise.)

Just after 5pm EST today (Friday, December 20), I finished the rough draft of my novel-in-progress, Amp. It’s about superheroes. Specifically, it’s about one superhero. Or, well, she was a sidekick. Then a vigilante. Now, maybe, she’ll finally actually get to be a hero. Or maybe she was one all along. (Is that corny? That’s corny. I won’t use that in the sales copy.)

I’m afraid to close the Word doc and lose the magic of this lingering moment.

I have 168 comments to myself in the doc, notes from “figure out the timeline pls” to long conversations with myself about character motivations and the meaning of certain events and the order in which clues are revealed. This will also be the manuscript I spend all next semester working on with my thesis advisor, in order to graduate from Emerson’s PopFic MFA program. There is so much work still to do, but so much work has been done.

I think I’m in shock.