Finished.

It has been over a week since I finished a draft of Canis Major.

In that time, I have daydreamed about visiting Iceland, have eaten dates and walnuts as I sipped my morning tea, have reread the phenomenal Fall and Rise, have annotated and loved Dracula. I do these things because it has still not sunk in that I have made it to the top of the hill, what with the hills that remain on my horizon. But the sun shines now on these hills, and they are verdant in the warm light.

Canis Major is about, among other things, 9/11, the portal fantasy, shapeshifters, and two brothers caught in the middle of it all. I suspect that all of us writers harbor the dream of turning our works into classics, that we believe if we can just get the story on the page as it is in our heads then it will be a masterpiece. I know what I want Canis Major to be, of course, but it is a matter of whether I can wrestle with those expectations, can pin them down into reality like they were butterflies.

I will return to the editing process on October 1st, an important date for me. It will be the seven year anniversary of my return to the world, my return to language. I cannot wait to whittle away the excess adverbs and try to forge something leaner underneath the themes and the sentence-level writing. All that remains is excitement and this short blog post.