I Interrupt My Blog To Say…

…MY NOVEL DRAFT IS DONE!

That’s right, four and a half months and 78,852 words later, a once-proofread draft is complete for the “Year of the Chick.” (see other blog)

Aside from that there’s nothing else to say, except it’s 2am, and I should be getting to bed now (am I really going to wake up at 6am? Yeah, yeah I am…).

So does this mean the late nights will end, and that I’ll somehow regain all the sanity lost from the last four months?

Well let’s not be ridiculous, I still get to edit!

But rest assured, regularly-scheduled blog-programming, blog-reading and “reply-to-comments” will resume next week.

Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, here for the first time EVER in the open public, two direct excerpts from the novel…

1. “I walked towards the scale with some newfound inner strength. What was I even afraid of?  I’d already told my mother that I hadn’t gained a pound in the last six months, so now I could prove her wrong.

The problem of course was that I hadn’t weighed myself in an entire year.

I thought about the snowman cookies from the day before, and the delicious foamy latte.  And what about the fact that I’d just eaten breakfast?  Everybody knows that weigh-ins after breakfast add three pounds.  Dammit.

With inner strength gone I finally mounted the scale.

The scale blinked on and off as it processed my weight. Meanwhile I attempted to stand on the sides of my feet.  I wasn’t really sure how that would lessen the number, but I tried it all the same.

The scale turned on for good with the final answer.

Holy Hell and God, I’d gained fifteen pounds in the last twelve months.”

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2. “The greasy-haired brown-skinned Indian man waved his rum and coke in the air, as his thick and bushy uni-brow pointed up and to the right, ever so suggestively. Of course every Indian girl whether hot, semi-hot or average had always been subjected to these uni-brow advances. The curse of unrelenting (and clueless) Indian men. Tonight though, I expected his interest a little more, since I was all decked out in my bright pink birthday dress, with matching nails and professionally curled locks of hair.

“Is your name Parveen?” He asked with a smile. His voice betrayed an accent that suggested emigration to Canada in the last twenty years. Not a “fresh off the boat” accent, but it was notable. I wouldn’t have minded the accent at all, if every Indian-born man I’d ever met in my life hadn’t conducted himself like a horny sleaze-bag who’d never seen a boob.”

And that’s all she wrote…for now.