78,800

It’s May, and flowers aren’t the only thing blooming into life around here … It’s taken an intense effort, but the first draft of MS2 is officially done!

New Growth

The crocuses come first, and in New England, it feels a little premature. They’ll invariably be buried in the snow. They raise their little purple and white faces to the sky, open their petals and smile, as though to say Spring is here, really, trust us!

Nothing against them. I like crocuses as well as the next guy, but—they’re not very trustworthy. I think we had two more blizzards after they showed up.

The forsythia comes next, and it’s a little more reputable, with its bursts of mustard yellow evoking the sun. The daffodils and tulips aren’t far behind, and together they say It’s time! Grab a rake. Clean out the beds.

And maybe the yard work gets put off a week or two. But in the end, gloves are donned. The rose bushes are pruned. The compost is harvested. The nasturtium seeds go into the ground. And the rake. The rake digs in with varying degrees of force, pulling out the autumn’s detritus and filling the air with the sweet scent of old decay and new beginnings.

After a long winter, it’s the most uplifting thing I can think of. It is—quite literally—the scent of potential.

But this spring, it wasn’t just the beds outside that got cleaned out these last few weeks. I also took the rake to my writer’s brain—teased out the barriers to a story from the undergrowth and exposed the bare earth.

I can’t wait to share with you what has sprouted—pushed up from underneath. 

A Matter of Time … And Numbers

It took one loving husband, two devoted cats, several cheering co-workers, a handful of Twitter writer friends, twenty-two chapters, sixty-four days, at least a hundred cups of coffee, two-hundred-eighty printed pages, and seventy-eight thousand eight-hundred words to tell this story.

But it’s been told! On Friday morning, for only the second time in my life, I wrote The End.

I can’t believe how fast. Just yesterday it was February and I was lamenting about the absence of furniture in my living room. It’s amazing what two months and a lot of determination can do. Of course, this is only the beginning. There’s a lot of work to follow, but I’ve written a strong foundation. The hard part is done.

The rest is just … A Matter of Time, which might be the title, by the way, but I can’t say for certain.

In the Meantime …

I’ve missed you all. I spent six years writing my first novel. Accomplishing the first draft of this one in two months required pushing a lot of other things to the side, this blog included. Thanks for waiting for me, and thanks for coming back. I’m aiming to return to a once-a-week format here for the time being, so, keep your eyes open. I’m eager to dive back in. And, fellow bloggers, I’ll be stopping by to say hello to you on your sites as well.

But for now, I hope everyone has been well, and I can’t wait to catch up.

Share your thoughts! Do you have a story ready to sprout? Do you find crocuses to be trustworthy, or do they just tease? What’s the best thing that happened in your life these last couple months? Tell me all about in the comments below.

Thanks as always for reading,

Gregory