First Draft Finished!

Saturday I finished the first draft of my novelette! Yaaaaay me! I'm pretty happy with it.

Tonight I started doing some targeted revisions, which is to say, things I know I want to change just on reflection while I was cranking out text. These include:

1. Two of the supporting characters have personas which made them fun to write, but which bear too strong a resemblance to the villains' personas. This makes them an unintentional "red herring", so I'm changing the supporting characters to be somewhat different.
2. I need to flesh out some of my descriptions, especially of the settings, which presently are pretty generic. I find this stuff to be harder than writing dialogue. Not that I think my dialogue is especially great, it just comes easier.
3. The ramifications of the story's climax I think are not shown very clearly, and I need to bring that out more, since the story I think becomes somewhat pointless if the goes right past the reader.

Then I imagine I'll be thoroughly sick of it!

Meanwhile, I've been mulling over my next story in my head. I have some disjointed ideas, but I'm trying to figure out the right plot in which to work with them. Something to keep my mind occupied while I commute to and from work, if nothing else.

I was reflecting this evening that sometimes it's hard to believe that I don't still live in Madison. It feels strange.

For some reason, what brought this on was thinking about replacing the battery in my cordless phone. (Yeah, I know. Thrilling.) Last time I did so, for my old phone (which now lives in my upstairs study), I was in Madison - over five years ago. I went to a little battery store on the west side, near the Circuit City. Around here, I'm not sure where I'd go. Fry's or Best Buy, I guess.

Much as with Boston, Madison feels a little less like home with each passing year. But Boston feels downright foreign to me when I go back there now, while Madison has reached that point where it feels like it's part of a dream of better days: The lovely springtime, the melting snow, hanging out with my friend Karen, attending several science fiction conventions each year, being able to bike from one end of town to the other in a couple of hours tops, and so forth.

Of course, the days weren't always better. I have plenty of good days here, and I had plenty of bleak days there. And while part of me would love to live there again, another part thinks it would feel like taking a step backwards (whether or not it actually would be).

I guess it's just a bit of homesickness. Or a longing for something different. It's just always surprising how strong the feeling is when it hits.