written or unwritten, books make me giddy

My library / was dukedom large enough. -- William Shakespeare

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Another milestone in the life of my book! And I should make a cake with candles, or build one of those crossing-state-line signs. "Welcome to the Next Draft, home of brilliant plot twists and happy readers."

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Because Part Three is done again! (Forget the cake. That announcement is worthy of fireworks, after everything this ragged section of the draft has been through!)

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So it took longer than I wanted, but yes, Part Three has been written again--this makes the fourth time I've written it. Sketched it out during Nanowrimo 2006, then rewrote it the next fall. Made some enormous strides in understanding my character and wrote it again... Fine-tuned last year's enormous strides, and yes, wrote it yet again.

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From scratch. (Is anything for the faint of heart?)

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Part Four--the last section of the book--is next up for retreatment, so I'm shuffling through notes and ideas for it...

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But before that work starts in earnest, I have this delicious weightless sense in my mind. It comes between the intense drafting sessions, this wonderfully luxurious feeling that there are stories everywhere. Which is always true, of course, but it feels palpable somehow.

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Like that summer night years ago, when I really saw, for the first time, the Milky Way spanning the night sky. Standing on a road between cornfields, Dad tracing that galaxy glow. A concept became seeable. Almost--on a night like that--touchable.

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In these days between drafts, I feel like I could stretch out my hand and drag my fingers through a veritable stream of stories, words, characters, narratives... They're pressing in all around me. If I could just hear them properly, maybe hold my head a certain way to catch their voices, I'd never get up from my desk.

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Truly wonderful for someone who wants to live, always, in the midst of story.

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Which brings us to home renovation. And one more perk of living with my parents for a while: they can afford built-in bookcases; I can afford stacking my books in piles. I prefer the former.

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Look, just look at what July has wrought in our living room!

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It has turned into a true library, a gorgeous, bright, wonderful place for coffee and writing and reading. Yum.

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And these books are another galaxy, another place where all I have to do is stretch my hand out... and which book will fall into it? CS Lewis, or Anne Perry, or PG Wodehouse? A bit of botany or the series on world history or the shelf full of epics?

Bookdrunk, I call it. That dizzy euphoria I always feel around so many pages of words. Heady and upsweeping and unfailing. That delirious knowing that no, no, I could never live long enough to read or write them all.

But I could try.