Consequently, when I finished the first draft, I didn't feel a huge amount of emotion - glad to finish it and tired, mostly - and I felt even less having finished three rounds of edits on it. Then, it was more, "Well, I knew I would get this done, and now I have."
Perhaps that's it... In the past, maybe I wasn't always sure I would actually finish the book. And indeed, there is a 'finished' book that I can't bear to edit. But I can't remember feeling so nothing about getting to this stage with a book.
A good friend suggested that I'd reached the "I'm a professional writer and this is a task that's been completed, so no big deal" stage. Much as I would love that to be true, I suspect the reality is more that I didn't get a holiday after launching the first three books of The Realm series, went almost straight into writing the fourth and am just exhausted now!
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The New Shiny Thing was waving (it's been waving at me for ages). But should I plunge straight into book #10 without having at least a bit of a break?
My brain didn't really give me an option! I had the characters fairly set in my head, and the setting, and some inkling of the plot, but nothing about the plot was concrete. I forced myself to take Monday as a 'me day' and wrote long-overdue letters to friends. On the Tuesday morning I was in a Zoom meeting for a podcast. And yes, you guessed it, by Tuesday afternoon, I was deep into thinking about book #10.
Has anyone else hit this after finishing? A huge feeling of, "Okay, done that. Now what?" Or is it just me? And how do people convince themselves to take time off??
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