There should be trumpets sounding somewhere...

Last night, bloggers and bloggettes, at 9 :05 pm (or roundabouts), this little blogger finished the first draft of the current WIP, soon to be known as the SDIP (second draft in progress). If I had had confetti in my hand I would have thrown it, if champagne had been poured I would have drank it, if there was a hand in the air I would have fived it. As it were, I simply handed the computer over to my partner in crime for final chapter reading. When he was done he looked at me in confusion.
"Is this it?"
"Yeah, that's it."
"What? No, you didn't answer a lot of stuff. What about [insert specific plot questions I'm obviously not going to reveal here] and [more plot questions]? What happens there?"
A shrug of my shoulders. "Doesn't matter."
This was apparently unacceptable to him. "No no no, this is a series. This is book one of, like, six." At which point he sketches out the plot points of the next five books for me.
Let me make it clear, this is not a series, nor do I intend for it to be. But as he went on, plotting out the next few thousand pages for me, I couldn't help grinning more and more. By the end of his diatribe, I looked like the Joker (the family friendly one, not the creepy scarred one, thank you).
"What are you smiling at?" he asks me.
"Nothing. It just makes me so happy that I could write characters that someone would care about enough to want to read more."
And it's true, that has felt like my biggest accomplishment (after actually finishing the damn thing, of course). There was definitely a lull period there where the only thing keeping me going was the fact that he asked me insistently for the next chapter. He deserves one of those high fives just as much as I do, what a trooper.
But let me make it clear, all fives, high or otherwise, will be directed to me first to be distributed as I see fit.
Huzzah!
Next stop: beta readers. Uf.