The journey to here...

BOOM!!

It's done.

Or I think it is at any rate.

Holy shit, it's done... It's been edited, re-edited, looked over, picked at, and, on one occasion, given the middle finger.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. Do I keep looking it over? Do I keep trying to go through and make it better? Do I just say, "Fuck it!" and let it be done?

This has been a long time coming and now I almost feel like I can't NOT do something with it. I'm mildly terrified. Releasing my prologue last week about gave me an anxiety attack... but now... shit. Now we're looking at a full-on book release.

And I have no idea how to react to this.

This has been almost fifteen years in the making. My first short story about coming home from Iraq was called Alone In The Light and I wrote it in 2004. It was published in an arts magazine at Indiana University. The first version of this was... very personal. It drew far too much from my own life and was less a fictional piece and more of an autobiography.

Over the last fifteen years that story has grown and evolved.

The first major change came when I wrote another short story called Realities. It was a "what if" story... as in "what if I'd met my wife while deployed." The story took my actual deployment and dropped in the woman who is now my wife, A.J. Bass. It was a fun story to write. What would she be like had she joined the army? What kind of person would I meet in this alternate reality? Well... Mary Fischer more or less.

Then the two stories got combined in a random Livejournal entry a few years back... and, well... Here we are. With the finished version of Alone In The Light.

It's no longer the 5,000 word short story about a guy sitting through his first day of class after experiencing war. This is now 120,000 words about two people coming home and trying to rediscover themselves in a world that is somewhat the same as before... but also wildly different. It's been a way to explore and look at my own PTSD as a result of things, and has been very cathartic.

With that all said - today I submitted my proposal for cover art and formatting. I also finished my final edits. Or so I hope.

I am very excited about this story and the chance to share it with the world - for better or worse.

Thank you for being a part of this journey. Thank you for taking the time to follow me on social media and interact with me.  I hope you like this story when it finally launches in a few weeks.

All my best,
Benjamin