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First of all, let me make it clear it’s not over, even though it is SO over. I am waiting to get the copy edited ms. back with questions/suggestions/non-negotiable demands etc. But that said, I woke up this morning wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself. I had been working every day for at least 10 hours a day pretty much since July 15.  I felt as if I were in some sort of surrealist prison camp. Each day I was led out to a giant field of granite boulders and I had to reduce them all to dust with my cracked and splintery sledge hammer, and not even a pair of work gloves. God forbid if I were to get too sick to swing the hammer and face-planted in the dust. The guards would just drag me off, leaving only a faint trail behind them.

When DavidandBarry told me in July that they needed the book by Nov. 1, I didn’t believe it was possible. And then a couple of weeks later, the deadline was amended to written and EDITED by Nov. 1, and at that point I KNEW it wasn’t possible. But I really wanted to do the book. So I thought, “Well, fine, I’ll just kill myself for three months, and then it will be over.”

But it’s one thing to anticipate killing yourself with work in the abstract, and it’s another thing to actually DO it. When I said this to my good friend the Vonster, he said that he once wrote a book in FIVE weeks, and not only did it literally nearly kill him, but ever since that effort, he’s been a little weaker and less creative than he had been before.

It remains to be seen if I will suffer that same fate. All I can say for now is taking time to eat lunch sitting down feels wrong, very very wrong.

Done at last, done at last, thank Gawd almighty, I’m done at last.

Kind of.

Wrote the final sentence. Now the work shifts from writing to editing. By comparison, that’s a vacation.

This wasn’t my REAL deadline anyway. The deal was Nov. 1. Oct. 7 was some kind of sadistic motivating tool dreamed up by D&B. But it served its purpose. I’m on chapter 13 and racing along at 3,000 words per day, hell bent to finish by the end of next week. I have no doubt I’m violating some unwritten speed limit and will be pulled over by the writing police any minute. I expect the officer to have mirror sunglasses, a big gut and a tweed sports coat with elbow patches. He’ll say, “Boy, do y’all have any idea what y’all are even saying in that manuscript y’all are so hellbent on finishing?”

The truth: I think so.

But I won’t really know for sure until I read it five years from now.

Ok, I’m not even going to address the question of whether I can possibly deliver a complete manuscript in 8 days. Can’t you see I’m working heah?

But what I will disclose is that after all this time without a clue as to the final sentence, or even the final idea — a time during which I simply waited in dumb faith that one would appear — one did appear. It always seems to happen like that. You just keep grinding forward blindly hoping that something will pop out of the periphery and make itself known. This is the final note, the ringing tone that will bleed into infinity, leaving a reader satisfied that the story is done. Now all I have to do is get all the words that lead up to that last one. It’s a lot easier when you can see the end.

Two things you’re going to notice right off: I don’t even have time to spell out Diary of a Whiny Writer anymore. From now on, it’s all acronyms, ATT (All the Time). Second: I don’t even KNOW what day it is. They all blur together now. But enough whining, even though that is what I do best. Let’s look at the bright spots — or are those just floaters in my eyeballs? Anyway, I’m beginning to benefit from getting to that point when, for better or worse, a lot of the material is down and sent to David and Barry* for their terrible swift judgment.Which means every time I start a new chapter, the bag o’ stuff that’s left is beginning to feel noticeably lighter. It’s a lot easier to focus. So much of the agony in writing is trying to somehow deliver the context necessary so that people can see why the Good Stuff is in fact so good. You waste your best material if people can’t fully appreciate the best-ness of it. Yet . . . all the context can threaten to be excruciatingly slow and boring. Can you see where I’m going with this? It’s an explanation for why the writing process is inevitably front-loaded with pain. In the beginning, you are struggling to make inherently less interesting material interesting, so that later on, the inherently most interesting stuff can just flow out, raising its arms for a triumphant victory lap, trotting on the back of all that went before it and taking all the credit. To formulate: beginning = more work, less yield; end = less work, more yield. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I can feel the turn coming.

*My editors are David and Barry. What are the odds? Every time I send them a new chapter, my email tries to automatically fill in the address for “Dave Barry.” At first, I wasn’t catching it, and I kept getting messages back from Dave Barry saying, “Looks good to me, but where’s the sex scene?”

Less than two months left. Why am I not panicking? I know why. I’m waiting to hear back from New York, where I sent the first 20,000 words. Two days ago. It takes that long to get the company lawyers to obtain a restraining order.

But seriously, and here’s the dangerous part, I’m secretly hoping they’ll gush all over it. Because who knows? Maybe it doesn’t reek like the rotted rutabaga in my vegetable bin. Maybe I’m not a total failure. Maybe this wasn’t the most insane idea in, like, forever.

As Glenn Beck can attest, miracles do happen.

What a beautiful morning!

Yes, I’ve come in off the ledge this morning. Give me until, oh, about 4 pm before I become suicidal again. Meanwhile, after butting my head against a section all day yesterday that I couldn’t make interesting no matter what I threw at it, I just said, well to hell with it, I’ll just jump cut to another subject!

It’s the equivalent of the parable about the novelist who could never make headway with his novel because he could never manage to get his characters out the front door.

The answer is: SCREW THE FRONT DOOR! One minute Dirk Dirkson is sipping cognac in his opulent Santa Monica beach house, the next, he’s swooshing down a glacier in the alps, an evil paramilitary militia armed with anti-tank guns on his tail. We’ll catch up with how he got there at a later date. Or maybe not.

Move on people. Nothing to see here.

I’m at that nauseatingly familiar point where I hate everything I’ve written. I hate the sentences as they form in my head. I hate WORDS in general.

I ALWAYS reach this point. And I’m always sure that although in the past I’ve gotten past it, THIS IS THE TIME I WON”T.

By the way: This is the time I won’t.

Watched 60 Minutes last night. They devoted most of the hour to the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. They got Mike Williams to repeat on camera, almost word for word, his testimony before the Coast Guard hearings about his ordeal after the explosions, and some of his concerns about safety on the rig. Then they interviewed an engineering professor who didn’t really seem to know much about oil drilling. They leapt wildly to some wrong conclusions about what was significant, and missed the most significant issues entirely. I’d been cursing the ungodly danged complexity of the blowout all day, but watching 60 Minutes, I was grateful for it.