She's excited about it because she had no idea it was coming (good job kids in keeping mum, especially over Christmas with the whole family at her house). She reads a lot and should be a good reviewer.
I'm excited because it's one of the significant milestones of the project. I've been working on it for almost a year and through all the outlining and thinking about it and dreaming about it and writing down ideas in my notebook and spending months in getting it all down on the laptop this is one of the moments I've really been looking forward to - surprising folks with the fact that I'm writing a book.
Not just writing one, but I actually have a hard copy of the second draft in their hands. As she and I talked about on the phone, it's easy to say you're writing a book just as it's easy to say that you're getting in shape to climb Mt. Everest, it's getting around to doing it that's the hard part.
Another thing: Just because I have completed the first rewrite doesn't mean that I count myself as having written a book. It has to be as good as I can make it; I have to lean back from the keyboard and realize that I just can't think of a way to make it better. At that point I will claim to have written a book.
A published book? That's a different animal.
So, now I'm waiting for the phone call from my folks. My brother has to wait until my sister has finished reading that copy. Sneezer, of course, knows its coming, but as he's in Iowa he may not receive his copy until later this week - or later next month, depending on how muddy the roads are to Granger and how the stage coaches are doing.
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