It’s times like these, when I’m coming out from under a flood of words that took over my whole body while I was eating lunch and shot through my fingers quicker than I could type them, causing me to get tomato sauce on my keyboard and leave typos galore without care of fixing them, when I finally reached the end of the Chapter That Would Not Die, when I knew what should happen at long last, that I love my manuscript a little more than I did this morning. Here are my pages, a bit more substantial than last time:

Other writers kiss their unfinished manuscripts too, I have to assume. Licking, sure, that’s gross—and would smudge the ink. But kissing’s cool, right? You don’t have to wait till it’s done, or becomes an actual book, do you?

Don’t answer that.

I think I’m feeling so good today because I’m realizing it’s almost all out on the page. I have approximately five more pages to write—one sequence—then done. And that’s when the major editing begins.