Soon, I will have an actual physical copy of my book, The Blue Jar, in my hand. That’s going to be amazing and unbelievable.

There’s the feeling of finishing something. Then there’s the feeling of putting that something out into the world.

I started this novel as a writing prompt on a Tuesday afternoon in a friend’s apartment many years ago. The deleted scenes and changed scenes could be a book in and of themselves. I cut and cut and cut. I changed.

The original ending attempted to bring lots of characters together in one big scene. Eventually I decided the scene was convoluted and hard to follow.

In the original draft I killed off a character that in the final version is very much alive throughout. And one of my favorite characters to write didn’t even exist in the first half-dozen drafts. Some scenes were cut when several rewrites couldn’t make them work. There used to be a dinner scene that had a few great lines in it. I loved the beginning. But it never rang true. I gave up and deleted it.

I deleted an entire subplot. I added new scenes. I moved certain encounters from one location to another.

Somehow it is still the same story.