11:15 pm, August 3, 2006 – I finished my novel! I started it on March 5, 2002. It (only) took me four years and nearly five months to complete, but it’s finished! I wrote the last seven and a half pages today, and now it’s done! I’m so happy!

I wasn’t sure how it was going to end; I had a few possibilities in mind, but I never really know how it’s going to turn out until it’s written, and I have to say I’m happy with it. It’s much more solemn and dark than I originally intended four and a half years ago, but I really like the symbolism and the way it came together. It might get altered a bit when I go through and revise/edit/type it on the computer, but for now, I’m happy and I don’t expect it’ll change much when I go through the editing process on it. There were a few surprises in there that I wasn’t expecting, but in the end, I like it.

I’m so excited to have finished writing my first novel! I know that it’s not that exciting since it’s following on the coattails of the thesis, but then again, I’ve also been working on this for far longer. Now, I just need to get it all typed up and get another couple notebooks to start work on book two. I’m so excited!!

Edit: The book (in the two original handwritten notebooks) is 260 pages long (although the French notebooks are a lot bigger, so I have no comparison in American paper), and I wrote 7.5 pages tonight. So by writing 7.5 pages, I finished the last 2.9% of the book. That’s all that was left! Crazy…