It certainly wasn't spam like. It was a well crafted introduction. I shall take it as a sign and merely say Hello.
Greetings from England and welcome to the forums. I might have to pick your brain sometime now that you mention you're from New York, as I'm setting part of my novel there. Hope you have fun on the forum
So now that I am over my initial burn at having my intro called spammy by a spam-detecting bot, I will try to post what I wrote in smaller doses. I write on the train a few hours each day. When I had more time during those care free swaths of my youth, I filled pages of loose leaf with purpose. I tore those pages out almost as quickly as I wrote them. Some existed for a time, to be read and reread by only me, until they either found their way beneath something made with mayonnaise in the garbage can, or else they fed a fire on a beach at night.
As am I, Penelope. Maybe it had something to do with the mayonnaise. But that made it through the second time. As I spend far too much time on a train each day, I decided to finally be productive. The words that spilled out of me ended up being something that would persist rather than end up in the garbage or on the fire. The thing that resulted just might be a novel. Whatever it is, I call it completed. It torments me now with its very existence. It speaks to me... "Publish me." So I came here to ground myself, and to get a handle on the insanity that is the unpublished novel sitting on my hard drive.
I suspect the bot may have been triggering on 'loose leaf' which can be a drug term or can refer to cheap tobacco - both subjects that get spammed about anyway - you're here now, so welcome. WRT your novel I'd tend to suggest that before answering the call of "publish me", there are other steps to go through- essentially you are at "first draft complete" stage which is great, but the next phase is to get some beta readers to look at and crit it , then you'll want to redraft a couple of times, then edit it for spelling and grammar issues, and then it may be ready to publish/self publish
You learn something new every day! And I haven't been living under a rock either. First draft complete indeed. I thank you for the direction you have provided. In my excitement, I hadn't even considered that there could be more work to do
