you're just as far in as you'll ever be out

Well kids, summer is over. My calendar says there are a few official days left and the weather in Seattle is as nice as it ever is but still, the sun is going down earlier by the day and I want to wear boots all the time. Fall is here. Meanwhile I have 340 pages of a new novel which seems to be the answer to the question: where the hell did my summer go?

If you've noticed that the internets have been almost completely Andrea-free since my last Chasing Thirty post on the Gloss (and this one from May) please know that I am not locked in my closet with a bendy straw plunged into a bottle of wine and bad case of writer's block. Actually, I've been quiet for the opposite reason: lots of writing and not so much wine (sadly, no bendy straws either). 

Here in the final stretch of my first draft, I'm remembering how good it feels to just obsess over a book, to disengage a bit with the outside world and get lost in your work. I take the escapism that comes with writing fiction for granted sometimes. And really, something about having a big pile of pages to make the experience tangible is so satisfying. One day you're staying at nothing but a blinking cursor, the next you think 'holy crap I wrote a book.'

For all that I worry about the business end of it, I forget sometimes that I actually really do love to write. That that has been the point all along.