It's Labatt Blue Time!

I'm having a beer. I'm celebrating, even though my fantasy football team is in the process of losing this week -- against my ex-girlfriend's team, no less.

I should be enraged. I should be throwing things and cursing myself for playing Travis Henry instead of Laurence Maroney, but I don't care. Because I just finished The Prometheus Gate, and I'm kicking back.

I didn't expect this. I was actually having a less-than-good day. We're kind of snowed-in here in Cleveland, and I don't really want to be here anyway. I have a bunch of cases next week that I don't want to do, and I used to enjoy fantasy football, which is now impossible. All signs were pointing to a bad Sunday.

Then I turned off the games and started writing -- and a few thousand words just spilled out. In the end, it turns out that the end pretty much wrote itself.

I had a minor breakthrough a few weeks ago. Up until then I had been pretty well stalled for several months. I had the end in sight, but it just wasn't coming together. Then I realized something. I hated one of the characters. He was passive and weak and he wasn't really doing anything for the story.

Characters are everything. The plot rises and falls on what they do, and what they do has to be authentic. It has to come out of who they are, and nothing was coming out of this guy.

Until I made one little change.

I made him a jerk. A miserable, misanthropic s.o.b. who never got over his wife leaving him, and still hates her years after their divorce. A guy who used to care about things, about his job and about other people, who is now just a bitter, sarcastic a**hole. He's only looking out for himself. He gave up caring about other people and other things when he decided that no one else cared about him.

And it all flowed from there. I re-wrote all of his scenes, and suddenly he meshed with the rest of the book perfectly (at least as far as I can tell.) It was liberating, too.

So now I'm done -- pending revisions and re-writes from my editor and the publisher, I guess, but at the moment IT'S DONE.

Time for a drink.

One postscript - thanks to any of you who just bought a copy of Lucifer. It's been selling better than usual lately on Amazon, maybe because of the holidays. I love the fact that anyone thinks it's a good idea to buy a book called The Lucifer Messiah for Christmas. Warms my little atheist heart.

Second postscript - turns out my fantasy opponent this week had an even worse game than I did, despite doing her best to beat me, going so far as to pick up one of Tom Brady's favorite receivers as a free agent the day before the game to try to run up the score. So now I'm really happy. I don't even care if I win in the championship next week.