T is for totally-in-the-zone

There is nothing better in this world than positive feedback on a project that you have been pouring your heart and soul into.
I have been writing a novel since I was somewhere around.... 17? I finished it when I was 19 and then school got in the way.
Now I have never been a fan of book clubs because I am a strange kind of reader; I don't like to be forced, I don't want to be rushed, everything depends on the book and what kind of savoring it needs. Some books are good to breeze through, some are so good that you fly through them too, some are intelligent and hard hitting and deserve a precise attention to detail, some are so thoughtful that you need to mull over every chapter or sentence and think about the taste of it, the feel of it, the way it was structured and the meanings it bears. Hence not being able to stick to a time structure made me wary of the idea BUT! In Vancouver I joined a meetup group called, Just Write and we did just that. We wrote. We sat together and for ten minutes had a chat and then for the rest of the two hours we wrote, in a coffee shop or a doughnut shop or wherever they had been able to wrangle enough seats. We all bought at least two items during the time we were there and the owners liked the peace we brought to the place. It didn't matter what you wrote or how you wrote, you were just with writers enjoying writing and getting enthused by the fact that they were writing. I loved it.
Hence when I picked up the book again to rewrite it and restructure it about 4 months ago I blew through the first chapters and am now almost halfway through a complete reboot to a story that is now much better in my eyes.

But I needed to get some kind of approval. Some kind of notion that what I was doing was good. So I gave it to the harshest critic I know, the one who -when she read the first draft- couldn't really get through it and ended up leaving it to the side. This was good though, you need a book to grab someone and you definitely don't want to have to force someone to read something to see whether it's good or not. You need to make them want more pages. And today, a couple days after I handed her the first sixty pages, she called to ask when the next ones were coming.
I cannot picture a better moment than when I saw a kind of incredulous smile creep along her face as she brought up the story. Her voice only strengthening her surprise as she admitted to really enjoying the story and suddenly realizing that she didn't have the whole thing.

I have never been happier. I've written enough pages today to convince me that this boost has put me in a zone that I don't soon want to drop out of. Something tells me however, that I won't.