It is (Almost) Finished

I finished the first draft of my novel last night. Tentatively, I'm calling it Thanaphine after a fictional drug I created. The main character is addicted to it. I get high vicariously.
The protagonist's name is Chancellor Drysdale, which was the name of a camper I had two summers ago at Camp War Eagle. This was when I was a counselor with Ricky Shade in the youngest cabin. We told the kids my name was Dragon Master and his was Night Hawk. They never knew otherwise.

Chancellor Drysdale was a blonde seven year old who wanted to punch everyone, but he had a great name. His punches hurt, too, if you weren't ready. He'd swim up behind you and hit you in your kidney like they do in movies, only he wouldn't know there was a kidney there. I guess he thought the whole body was made up of funny bones, and a person could float in the pool completely numb if you hit them enough.

Chancellor Drysdale in my book is a time traveler. The plot takes place in the last three days of the world; since he can time travel, there about as many flashbacks as there are present actions, explaining how everything got to be in such bad shape. There are many timelines, from the many times past events have been altered. Chance can remember these separate timelines, where he had different childhoods, and went to different schools, and had a dog that lived versus a dog that died early. Because of this, he's developed something like multiple personalities.

If all that was happening to me, I'd be addicted to fictional drugs, too.

It's 280 pages. I have a month to edit it before I turn it over to my thesis committee and go skiing for spring break. While skiing I will never think about this novel, because it's all I've been doing for nine months.

Longer than that. Two years ago when I worked at Camp War Eagle, before my cabin with Chancellor and Ricky, I was on a day off when I saw the movie Time Cop. I was flipping through channels and stopped on this Civil War period piece, where a highway man tries to rob a general; suddenly the highway man pulled laser guns out of his trench coat and I thought, "This is what I have been seeking. I know what my purpose is." The movie is terrible, but I named a character in my book after the evil mastermind. McComb. He was a senator in the movie, but in the book, he doesn't even have a first name.