I think I said it at the end of last week, but I’m saying it again to convince myself.

The first edit is done. When I say “first edit” what I’m really talking about is the first series of edits, a smattering of various angles of refraction on this novel of mine that I’ve been alternately using and discarding over the past… god… seven months? Seriously, the time for this “first edit” has now handily outlasted the time it took me to draft the novel in the first place. That fact makes sense to me now, having gotten my hands and feet quite bloody along the way and having read a lot of advice in the interim, but if you’d told me at the outset that editing would take longer than writing the novel in the first place, I’d have had a good laugh at you.

I mean, the writing — spinning the tale out of the void — that’s the hard part, right?

Ha. Ha, ha ha ha ha. No.

But I’m not here to talk about the edit. I’m thinking about what comes next. Because it’s now time to cut the cord on this thing and release it into the wild. And then I’m going to have to play a waiting game in the meantime while it founders around out there, waiting to hear from actual real people what I need to do to actually really fix it and make it worth possibly sending to a for real editor, agent, publisher (seriously, I have no idea what to do from here).

To my way of thinking, there are basically two things I need to consider after I send this thing out for reading and do my best to put it out of mind for a month or two. 1) Figure out what my plans are, and my time frames for accomplishing said plans, for when I get some reviews back. 2) Decide what the next project is. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this whole writing process, it’s that momentum matters.

So, it’s time to get my eyes up on those two things. In fact, I took a break mid-post to take a step on the first thing, and reached out to a friend of mine whom I’ve been out of touch with for entirely too long. Sorry about that. But there’s no time like the present.

And nothing like a stream-of-consciousness post to kickstart my thinking and remind me there are things I should be doing.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.