My Book is Finished

I have finished my book.  I typed the last word at about 12 o'clock, the 5th of October, 2012.  This is enormous.  This is immense.  This is incredible.  

My plan for the book consisted of fifteen green post-it notes on my wall.  As a final act of completion, I pulled this off.  The act was like plucking leaves from a tree.  The wall is so bare.  

As I wrote the final scene of the last chapter, my heart was racing just like it does when you're about to perform in a play or a dance recital.  The ending was heartbreaking for me.  The end scene gave me the grieving process that I knew that I would need.  I have said my goodbyes, sobbed on two different shoulders and smiled so widely it seemed my lips would snap like rubber bands.  

I am so proud of this book.  My mother says that it is timely.  I wrote a book with a sub-current of 'saying goodbye' just as I prepare to leave school and wish farewell to many people that I'll never see again.  I wrote without realising that what I was doing was making a transitional object, building a bridge into a new phase of my life.  I am proud enough of this book, this dear, personal, sacred book, for it to be my début work.  However, when I look back upon it, thirty, forty, fifty years in the future, this book will shine out to me as a part of my teenaged soul.  

It is not a foreign body to me.  It is completely and totally a part of me.  It is a diary entry, a dream, a hope, a legend, a cry, a whisper, a message in a bottle, a present state of being.  Today, this book is me.  I will grow, but that will not make it less me.  In years time, it will be me-of-the-past.  Me-of-the-future can always cherish and remember this present.  

What a joy, and what a triumph!  I reward and thank myself for this story with a cup of tea and a good cry.  The book is about stories and feelings.  This book holds the current essence of my as a writer.  I want this book to be my début.  

I don't know when I will get it published, but within the next two years, my university course in creative writing will teach me to present a literary work to a publisher.  Perhaps that will be the time for it.  Or perhaps the time is sooner.  Let us see.