Adventures in GALing

[AntoniaB]

So, time to acknowledge an outcome of my divorce...tonight I hit 200 pages double spaced typed for my book, which comes to just over 67,000 words. I still have a chapter and a half to write and the intro to add a little to and then I have to edit the whole thing, but I was afraid I wouldn't hit 75,000 words which was my low-end projection and it turns out that I'll hit it and then some as I'm not cutting content drastically when I edit.

So that's 67,000 words written of the best ideas I've ever had in my life overall as a literary analysis person/critic, and I did that in 7 months. Some people have told me that this is "like" me doing a Phd Dissertation in terms of size and complexity, except that most people take 2-3 years to write their dissertation.

This book would simply not exist if I had not been betrayed by my ex. I never had the ideas, the concept, much less the focus or the drive to write it if we'd have stayed married. The thing is that regardless of the future of this book, I learned that I really love research and writing more than I allowed myself to admit all these years when I did it piecemeal, and the actual process of writing has produced several moments of a type of bliss that I only get when I come up with the right words or right critical argument/evidence, and that's pretty priceless.

So I pretty much learned something incredibly valuable about myself through the process, and it's that I am probably most excited about my life when I'm reading, researching, writing, analyzing, and by extension, teaching the stuff I find interesting.

Thanks, ex-husband, for unblocking the direction I was supposed to move in all along :-)

What would have been our 20th anniversary is Wed. Should I write a thank you note? LOL ;-)