thank all the gods! (and the local and Twitter friends, too!)

well, well, dear reader.  if you were on Twitter this afternoon, round about threeish (BST), you may have seen this:

RRRRRAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! AT LAST! AT LAST! AT LAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES! YES, YOU BITCH!!! YOU DIDN'T DEFEAT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and, shortly after, this:

*************************EPIC HAPPYDANCE**********************************

that was the sound of me finally, FINALLY!!! finishing the typing up of the bloody WIP.  gods, but it's been a slog.  it has taken me approximately 84 days, and an awful lot of tearing my hair out to get this effing thing onto my hard drive.  i think some of the horror was partly due to my not believing in this one as much as the last one.  i realised pretty early on that it was flawed, and i almost re-genre'd the whole thing.  in fact, i rewrote about the first 8,000 words, in an attempt to do this.  that didn't work, either.  the problem was always with the beginning.  in fact, this weekend, i wrote up the most troublesome section (about 8-ish thousand words) using the simple expedient of just ignoring large parts of the original text.  there was actually a lot of rambling and place-marching in the first 10 or 15 thousand words, which was a big part of the problem.  so i just took a big machete and hacked at it until i could bear to type it.  it seemed to work

so, now, i have a big lump of story that needs to be carved into something readable.

this is gonna be interesting.

and, before i go, thankyouthankyouthankyou with big, massive GINORMOUS happyhugs to all of my local and Twitter friends who have kept me sane and encouraged me and distracted me from the horror of the typing.

love you guys! XXX

.