Having the life of a professional, full-time writer is my dream long-term goal destined vocation. I’m one of many with said inclination, I know. But, what is “full-time” and how much time is optimal for producing good work? I know there are some writers who claim to write for truly six to eight hours a day, but I think anyone that can maintain such a schedule, for more than a couple of weeks, harbors a specific type of mania. I had one of those six hour days yesterday.
It’s euphoric, and depressing, to come to the end of a large project. Yesterday I finished a novel, a novel I’ve been working on, in sometimes misguided directions, for years. Since 2003. So, that makes five years. Of course, this isn’t the first time I finished it. I finished it, as a collection of fifteen short stories, back in, oh I don’t even know. I reworked that material and tried to pass it off as a novel for a workshop in 2006. Then I decided, at the end of 2006, that the entire thing needed a different chronological structure and a new point of view. Profluence. So.
Over the last week or so I was nearing the end of this year-long rewrite; yesterday I rewrote two, glaringly wrong, chapters and did a huge chunk of superficial editing. I can’t believe some of the stuff I wrote in the past. Things like “The girls collapsed to the floor.” Duh. For the most part, editing consisted of crossing out phrases. Dumb phrases.
Working though a novel-length manuscript led me to to feel alternatively masterful and idiotic. There is a type of mania that sets in when really nearing the end of something, whether it be a large work or even a short story. (Maybe it’s just the caffeine.) But then, when it’s over, I’m completely drained. It’s a crash, intellectually and physically.
Having years of work wrapped up into one tiny ball of art is also a tenuous reality to carry around. Now what? I don’t know. I felt productive in one sense yesterday, but my accomplishment wasn’t concrete enough. That same day I polished four short stories and sent them off. Submitting stories was a concrete action to take. What of the novel? It’s a computer file. Who knows if it’s any good. Sometimes I know. But you can’t know always about those things, or else what fuels the bursts of mania to make everything more and again and again?
Amber Nicole Brooks 
I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!!
You did it! You finished!! YAY!!!!!!
I hear you about the mania. For the last few months I’ve been so wrapped up in my novel that I’m turning into a Certifiable Crazy Person. I go from ecstatic jumping up and down and whoops of joy to gut-wrenching sobbing and tearing out of hair like THAT. I’m more emotionally involved with my characters than I have ever before, and whenever I find myself hurting them (which I must), it physically hurts ME. I am a total zombie at work, unable to concentrate on anything but where I’ve left my characters, what they are doing, and what they are talking about.
Gah. Writers are nuts.
And congratulations on submitting four more stories! Dude, you are on a roll. I’m so impressed.