Ah, well. I'd hoped that I'd be able to announce the completion of the Frog novel in this journal entry, but despite writing about ten thousand words this weekend, it's not finished yet. I'm up to the penultimate chapter, so there's nothing left but the climactic battle and the falling action (and I've actually written a bit of the falling action already, because I came up with some nice dialogue this morning and wanted to get it down, and once I started, I kept writing for a bit). I could push on and finish it tonight, but I think if I did I'd wind up rushing the awesome climactic scenes I've been building towards, and then I'd just have to rewrite them all later anyway. Better to wait, and do it tomorrow night, when I'll be fresh. Right now my shoulders hurt, my eyes are bleary, and my wrists crack when I move them. It's a familiar feeling. It feels like I'm finishing a novel.

Once I finish the draft, I'll spend the rest of the week typing in the various handwritten bits that haven't been entered yet, and then I'll do a read-through to catch any glaring errors I happen to notice. Then, probably next weekend, I'll send it off to first readers, so they can catch all the glaring errors I didn't, and point out logical flaws, and continuity errors, and whatever else they feel bears mentioning. Then I'll figure out what kind of revisions I need to make.

I think it's a good book. Maybe even very good. I'm happy with it. I know exactly what happens in the last two chapters, so I've got no anxiety that it's going to fall apart on me in the last twenty pages. In a sense, it's all over now but the typing, which I'll finish this week. I've been living with these characters for a while. I'm going to miss them.

So I guess it's a good thing that this is, tentatively, the first novel in an open-ended series featuring a recurring cast of characters. If I miss them, I can always come back.

It was a fine weekend. Heather and I went to look at possible wedding sites yesterday, and saw some nice ones. Today we took a walk down to the lake district, had lunch, browsed in a bookstore (I picked up a used copy of Christopher Fowler's Roofworld, which I've wanted to read for a while), and generally strolled around. In between, I read, and did a lot of writing. Pretty much a perfect balance of work and play, and the weather was great. Hope you all had a nice one, too.