Done for now

I'm calling an official end to the second rewrite today, giving up the last two days I had to work with before handing off a solid draft to my friend who is going to read it over the holidays. I made a clean version without any of the comments in the margins and I'm taking the thumb drive to Kinkos tonight to print it out. 540 pp. He's probably going to regret seeing me on his doorstep with that.

He didn't give me a definite time when he would be finished, but I'm not expecting it before Martin Luther King Day. And I'm reluctant to start making revisions of my own before that and thereby confusing what his comments might apply to.

So, I have for the first time in this process a break of about 5 weeks where I know I'm not going to be working on it. What I should be doing is trying to rustle up some paying clients to compensate for how much time I've been putting into this and expect to put into it after my friend gets back to me.

What I feel like doing, though, is writing. Despite all the "rewriting" work, which has been a kind of drudgery, it feels like forever since I wrote anything. I'm tempted to get out pen and paper every morning kick it old school for a couple hours, especially to see if I've picked up any skills along the way that would manifest themselves in a new short story.