It's done!
Whew—I can't even tell you how much better the story is today than it was a week ago. Almost every graf has been touched. Every chapter has been improved. Some sections have been completely rewritten.

And the ending! is! totally! different!

Now the clock is running down. It hits zero at midnight tomorrow (yes, Halloween, naturally) but there's not a ton of drama to it. Thanks to you—backers and patrons and ultimate ninjas alike—this project has been a huge, amazing success.

There's still a lot of work to do... work that involves, like, paper and paint and postage. But the essential core—the part where I, you know, write a book—is now complete.

There's a little video thank-you at the end of this update, but first, for your amusement, here are some snapshots of the feedback I got on the manuscript. If you are supremely spoiler-wary, then you should probably skip down to the video. But don't worry too much; these are glimpses, not giveaways.

So, this is definitely how you want to kick things off...

...but not, alas, how you want to end them:

"It's a cool idea... but it's v. unsatisfying." Ack! (I fixed that.) (I think.)

Sometimes you go a bit overboard and get compared to the "Saw" movies...

(How right was that note, by the way? Ditched the image.)

Conversely, sometimes you don't go far enough:

Sometimes you hit a little too close to home:

And sometimes—warning, this is sort of a mega-glimpse—you are encouraged to, er, reorganize... just... slightly:

(Those notes look like IKEA instructions.)

Finally, this might be my single favorite note. "IT CAN FEEL???"
Okay—now, a quick video. You're not going to hear from me again before the clock hits zero, so again: Thank you. There is great fun ahead.

P.S. "IT CAN FEEL???"