Four Down, Eight to Go!

Day Thirty: 52,798

This month has been a bit of a wild ride.

But I made it.

Any other survivors?

I actually crossed the finish line last night, but I have a hard time declaring a story done until the story itself has an ending. This one was hard to end. I’ll miss the characters, I’ll miss them living and hurting and fighting in my head at all hours of the day. I gave my main character a good ending, though. One that leaves plenty of room for more visits to her story. I’ll still miss her.

What I won’t miss are the dreams. Every night since I started this book I’ve spent each my sleeping hours fighting vampires. In warehouses, in the shadows, in my house. Each night, my mind has been filled with them.

Yeah, I know it’s probably due to this being my third book about this particular vampire hunter. Maybe I’m too close, or maybe she’s too much like me, or maybe while writing about vampires I should lay off the getting sick and watching Buffy and Angel marathons while eating red varieties of jello.

Maybe that’s the easy explanation.

But I also have discovered something. I don’t just write a story, I live it. It stays in my brain with every story I listen to on the raio and every book I read. It’s exhausting in some ways, but it also seems that the story lives me if I let it. If I can figure out how to get out of the way, and most days I manage to do so.

I think maybe this is why I end each month feeling so empty and so complete at once. I’ve lived a month in love with a vampire, or putting my life together after losing everything, or journeying to the heart of the dark fairy land to retrieve something lost.

I’m getting to live so many lives at once. And I’m learning how to do bad things to my characters, slowly, as I learn that I can take it. And so can they.

It makes me excited to find out where else I have to go, and what else I might get to learn about myself.

I can’t wait to find out what comes next.