Endings - Part 2: What Comes After...

Hello, readers. This is the second part of my new experiment: a two-part blog post coming over two weeks. As I come to the end of a new book, I found myself experiencing and pondering the mechanics of being an author who is coming towards the end of a story. I've been working on this since December last year, and not withstanding self-publishing three other titles since then, it's been a difficult run. But now I'm approaching the end of the road, and that's the time you've got to be most careful. (PS: Sorry about the wierd font display, Google Blog editor is being wierd.)

This week, I'll talk about actually coming to the end of a piece of work. It's the end of the long road, you've seen your characters through to their conclusions, you've settled down and look back over the months/years you've worked on this project. And personally, what I felt was a sudden emptiness and anxiety. This work had given me a sense of purpose for the past nine months, it had been infuriating and infatuating all at once. I have faced weeks of being stuck because of the story not flowing properly, or considering carefully where to take the story so as to properly make use of the themes and content without it becoming gratuitous.

It's only been two days or so since finishing this work (perfect timing for this blog post), but it already feels like an entire month. That sense of distorted time also comes with finishing a big project. It came with Crystal and Sin, and it's come with this. It's so momentous that you don't want it to end. A bit like a period of your life that you sorely miss, it seems to haunt you. But that's when you need to step back, look at it from a distance. Personally, I'm taking the rest of this week off, then finding a new project to work on and getting back to the normal business of managing my writing business. But that's just me.

And then, what next? Inevitably, the proof reading. where after a suitable amount of time you have to go through the entire thing and check for errors large and small: from continuity mistakes to the always-pervasive spelling and grammar mistakes. The entire thing as it stands is over four hundred pages, written in a style that hearkens back to an idea of archaic speech intended to contrast sharply against the mature tone and themes. I have to go through all that, ensure that every character's dialogue is convincing, make sure everything is where it should be, and try not to kick myself in the proverbial perfectionist posterior when I find a very obvious mistake.

So now, I close on this final thought. No-one is perfect, no-one should be expected to be perfect. And at the end of such a large project, and with (fingers crossed) a whole life full of similar events in front of you, you have every right to sit back and be human. Once a while...