I finished the first draft of “The One” today. I was listening to my Mp3 player, and pushed my way through the outline, through the epilogue.
No, I don’t have a publisher. No, I don’t have an agent. No, you can’t read it, yet. But, yes, I have finished my first novel. It may be crap, for now, but it is 357 pages, start to finish, prologue to epilogue. 
I remember sitting in an awful classroom in Royall Hall, on the UMKC Campus in Kansas City. The room was a box, no windows. Just 18 desks or so, a table and chair, an overhead projector chained to its stand, green chalkboard and its dusty ledge. Professor Jim McKinley spread his arms on the table and talked about writing shapely fiction. It was afternoon, and sometimes he smelled like whiskey, but he was always there, on time, lucid and succinct. He told us about the heat of Spain. We listened to each other’s stories: a surgeon unable to cut; a gay man who loses his friends, his job as a telemarketer; a waitress lying bloodied in wet alley. His comments on our drafts were specific and encouraging.
Time to edit.
