Well, it wasn’t three books a year. But two outta three ain’t bad.

Just minutes ago, I completed my third novel lifetime and second in nine months, The Best of All Possible Worlds. It weighs in at 96,070 words (~384 pages), just a bit longer than Loosely Based and well short of American Dream On.

It took me three months and eleven days to write. Like every novel I’ve written on a deadline so far, I finished it about a week ahead of deadline (in this case, 21 June).

The last 142 pages of the book (37% of the total) were written this month, June, the last fifteen days, during which I wrote on every single day except 5 June.

Now, of course, begins what will probably be 2-4 weeks of editing, depending on how intensely I can work on it and how much work it ends up needing. It could actually be longer than that if my concerns from about a month ago persist about some of the book fundamentally not working. I really think I’ve wriggled away from those concerns, however, and feel very good about what I wrote in June rendering those prior concerns moot. It will take at least a full detailed reading to be sure, though.

If you’re interested, drop me a line. I think it should be available for distribution sometime in the last week of July, shortly before I depart for Africa.

I’ve been close enough to the finish of this one for a while that I don’t feel quite the incredible euphoric elation I normally do. I’m sure once I go a couple days without writing, I’ll become a little more convinced that I’ve actually done it. And when I’m convinced it works. But maybe I’m just getting accustomed to this feeling, to this sense that my plan for my life is actually working, or starting to. Maybe the euphoria had built up for seven years and now it’s only had a little time to build up in the six months since I last finished a first draft.

In any event, I’m at least very very satisfied. Happy. Feeling, dare I say it, hopeful.