It is finished!

On Sunday, January 1st, 2006 I had an idea for a novel. It started with a few paragraphs in my journal and I called it Side Effects:

We are the original desperate housewives. And we aren’t just wives. We’re girlfriends and husbands and children and mothers and friends and co-workers and friends of your wives and people who go to your church or members of your father’s Bible study. We’ve been here since, well since there was war. Since there was the notion that we, the collective we that is the United States, felt the need to go away and protect others. Go away and help.

But the collective we that is us, those of us left behind, have spent the majority of that time since being ignored, under appreciated, not valued, and overly relied upon. And that’s okay. Because that’s what we do when our men, and now our women, go off to war. We stay home.

And we’re not complaining. We can’t imagine what it must be like to live in the land of sand, to eat MREs every meal, to fear bullets and land mines with every step, to leave our home, our family, our lives for months on end and wonder if we’ll ever make it back and if we do, what will be left. But we’re saying staying at home’s not easy either.

You know how when your doctor prescribes a medication and you go to the pharmacy and you get the bottle and you take it out of the little white bag and that paper falls out? That paper that lists the hundred or so side effects that could happen; everything from a slight cough to brain hemorrhaging. Well that’s how we feel at times. We’re the side effects that no one pays attention to until something happens. You search the trash for that paper at three a.m. when you’ve got a nosebleed that just won’t stop or when your stomach starts cramping twenty minutes after you’ve swallowed the pills.

We are those side effects. We cause a little heart burn, a little constipation, a slight headache, but until the knock on the door and the men in suits arrive, no one pays us any attention.

Over two and a half years later, it's now called An Everyday Silence and it's 152, 669 words.

At 4:11pm today, Monday, October 27th, 2008, I finished the first draft of this novel!!! My novel!!! I know, I am very excited. For those of you who've been tracking my progress with me, thank you for the encouragement, for the comments and for the suggestions. It's been all-consuming and exhausting and the coolest adventure ever! To get to know these characters and share their stories on the page. I only hope that one day they'll be not just stories on a word processor's page but on a book's page as well.

So that's it. A draft is done. According to Anne Lamott it's probably a shitty first draft. But it's written and it's mine and that can never be taken away from me. Now I just have to edit and rewrite and find a publisher. All the easy stuff!

It's been two years, ten months and twenty seven days. It's been a lifetime. It's written. I seriously cannot explain what this feels like...