I killed a couple of trees this weekend.

No, not the two little crepe myrtles I planted last summer (although I am worried about them, because they’re my only foliage that hasn’t started budding yet). I’m talking about the trees that paper is made out of. Which reminds me to say, I got my new “refurbished” laser printer from Fry’s the other day and got it hooked up (it uses a USB connector so I didn’t even have to crawl up under the desk to plug it in…just plugged it into the second USB port on the front of the CPU that I never used anyway!). But I digress…

I finally forced myself to sit down and make the corrections to the 3rd draft of Happy Endings, Inc., which didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. Half of the six hours was spent mostly just formatting the e-mails from my mentor into a version I could print (I’ve been pasting my chapters directly into e-mail and sending them to her, which come back to me in a “plain text” version with hard breaks after every twenty words or so and a > at the beginning of every line). That printed on about 165 pages. (Arial 9 point font.)

While editing page 314 of 344, as I dragged and dropped to move a word, a “fatal error” popped up–and I panicked! When had I last saved my changes? How much would I have to go back and fix again? I chose the option for Word to restore my document while it restarted, and it came up with all of my changes in tact. (Praise the Lord!)

So as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition started in the background, I clicked Print and sent my full manuscript to the printer. Thirty minutes and three paper refills later, I had two enormous stacks of paper (after a false start of about 65 pages when I realized I’d forgotten to put a header with my name, manuscript title, and page number on it) containing the final product of nearly three years’ work. I started this manuscript in the fall of 2003, finally wrote an ending for it in May 2005, and have spent the last ten months editing and refining it.

What an odd feeling it was to see it printed out like that. No, it’s not the first time I’ve seen a full draft printed–I printed it and put it into notebooks for my mother and grandmother for Christmas. But for them, I reformatted it to print single spaced and front & back to save paper. I work with reams of paper at work all the time — I print at least one document each week of nearly 200 pages. But to see a stack of 344 pages containing my story gave me nearly the same thrill as when I finished my first full manuscript five years ago.

Tonight, all I have to do is write a 1 page synopsis of the novel and then take it up to the 24 hour post office to mail off to my two readers who will hold the future of my Master’s Degree in their hands. After that (and a couple of critiques and judging a few entries for the ACFW Genesis contest), it’s full-steam-ahead on writing Ransome’s Honor, with a goal of having it finished by Thanksgiving.