Completing a Draft

There is only one thing better than the slow climb to orgasm. This is the moment when you know that the first draft is almost complete. There is this sense that you are expanding and that all of it, the whole world that you are just about to birth, is enclosed in your open hug. There is a moment when you feel that perhaps you are close to the idea of infinity. You can sense the colour and the shape of it and if you just keep typing, one more quick chapter after another, that you will have reached a place where everything is known and you can rest easy there.

I have just emerged from such a place. My back aches. My eyes are sore. My stomach throbs from the excessive amounts of Neurophen that are needed to sustain twelve hours of writing a day for so many days. I am in pain. I am happy. It is like sex only more so.

I sit with the index cards and the draft glowing on the computer screen and my notebook full of scribble and it is just like the morning after sex. I look at the thing that I have done and it has lost that special shine that it contained only hours before. It is messy. There are holes in it. It is tired already and it has only just been brought into the world. I flick through the chapters and I wonder if perhaps it is quite boring. It is certainly long and filled with bad tenses and misspellings. I wonder why anyone would bother reading it at all.

Still there are those hours when it was being completed. There is the moment before the final full stop and the words The End which I typed, just to feel the sense of it and then highlighted them and pressed delete because I never write The End at the end of a manuscript anyway. Those hours were the best I have ever had. In those hours, and in the after glow, I was happier than I can ever remember being.

I have said this before. I said the very same thing when I finished the first draft of my last manuscript, and the manuscript before. I realise now that this is why I write. Not for those rejection letters that leave me sobbing on the back deck outside Avid Reader. Not for the humiliation that I naturally feel when someone says - how's the writing going? Not when my grandmother says - you have a publisher yet? You must have a publisher. You are not a writer if you do not have a publisher. I know she just wants me to achieve something wonderful. I know she only wants the best for me. But in this moment, now, here at the end of something and the beginning of the long and boring trudge across the same territory that is the process of rewriting, here, I know what I have come for.

I have never been happier.

And at the end of the first draft of my next manuscript I will repeat myself. And again and again and again until one day when I grow too old to write any more and only then will I die.