...for those who were wondering about this, I finished my novel! (Requisite "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!") I spent all of yesterday afternoon printing it out (seriously! It took five hours! I hate our crappy printer!) and last night and this morning re-reading it for the first time. And I'm pleased to report: I don't hate it! Hurrah!

I'm going to show it to my mom once I've fixed the most glaring typos, and then I think I'll feel okay letting other people read it. But until then:

Things I learned whilst re-reading that publishing sensation-to-be, The Chambers of the Sea

-If you use the phrase "with an expression of intent concentration on her face" three times within 100 pages, people will notice.

-Girls in fake beards are hot. My current reading of War and Peace confirms this. I wrote my "girls in fake beards" scene long before I read his, but I'm glad Tolstoy and I are in agreement on this point.

-Extended jokes in Dutch are funny. Even if you don't speak Dutch.

-Sure, footnoted e-mails sound fun in concept, but have you tried formatting them lately?

-I write lyrics that would shame David Brent.

-All my characters sound kinda like me. Which means they all sound kinda like characters on Buffy.

-Voyeurism! Yay!

-If you put down the last page of your novel and think, with an impossibly wide grin on your face, "This ending is gonna make people cry!", you might want to look into revising your moral code.

And for those of you who like stats (IOW, me):

Total number of words: 118,454
Total number of pages (my computer): 443
Total number of pages (brother's computer): 424
Date started: December ? (7th, maybe?)
Date completed: June 22

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

A man dreams of leaving
But he always stays behind
U2, "Lemon"

I was doing a random search, looking for Prufrock-themed desktops (though I don't actually know what that would be), when I found this site which, as you'll see, at the top of the page has what they say is an mp3 of T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I don't know if it's the genuine thing--how can I know what he sounded like?--but it's certainly strange and odd and evocative, and very worth listening to.

So yeah...listen to it. I have nothing else to say.