Finished the draft of Summerlands, looking at the next book to finish, already in progress

Let there be great rejoicing! Particularly from those who are tired of hearing about this particularly agonizing drafting process, haha. Seriously, I usually write a draft straight through in one or two months. This is not normal for me. It's because it's an old story idea that's been written out a bunch of times.

I've been listening back to old episodes precisely to get those insights about the draft that I had while talking it out during the recording, but immediately forgot. 

I've been working insanely long hours on this all week. But don't give me too much credit. It's really because my hands hurt too much to keep reupholstering the loveseat. I know! Stop using furniture as a displacement activity from your main displacement activity!

Anyway I have a few more things to fix and then have to let it sit before I reread and start the rewrite.

I want to fix/finish the novel 40/40 next, but ought to tackle the short story collections and send them out into the world. 40/40 is short for Forty Days and Forty Nights. I don't even know how long that draft is right now. Ooh, 66K words. 

The route to a finished draft is: make it wildly epistolary, the way our lives actually are right now. This is a new freshman so she lives in a world of textual communication. Imagine a transcript of that day with all the text included. Podcasts (I have one on right now), texts, email, assignments you write, TikTok and all the other social media, Tumblr because that's the one I actually know and it's pretty text-based versus video or image, comment threads on things--oh boy!--feedback on assignments, transcripts of therapy sessions, notes taken in class (I just found some I wrote), letters from psychos, official documents, but most of all those texts sent back and forth between friends.

Meg Cabot does this SO WELL in the Boy series. Boy Meets Girl, The Boy Next Door, Every Boy's Got One, and The Boy is Back. Actually I can't remember whether that last one is still epistolary. 

Meg Cabot is absolutely brilliant at these romances because she writes characters who are so funny and so blind to certain things and so mad about other things and so on. People are bewildered by each other and confused and irritated and full of lies. I love the lies so much. 

I'm going to read those three but I might have donated the fourth as I did not really like it, though I can't remember why. It didn't fit with the first three very well. 

If I could write something CHEERFUL again, that would be amazing. Lord, Summerlands was grim, though it had funny parts, but overall it deals with very stressful things. Mandate: make it stressful and all, but also cheerful and fun. OKAY.

Remember how much fun the Thrushcross books were, even when they dealt with big stressful things? Yes. Do that. 

Because I'm me, I put this up on Amazon already as a preorder. WHY. It's a first draft. I will have to push this date, unless I miraculously rewrite this draft, edit, proofread, get a proof copy in the mail, fix whatever I missed, and get this up in time. If so, it'll be out January 6th. WHY NOT?