This morning, I walked twenty kilometres, hoping a new story might rearrange itself in my mind. It didn’t, but I did get to top up my sunburn as well as thinking a lot about the book I recently finished writing. You see, books are like the killers in slasher films, and just when you think they’re out for the count, those mofos spring back up to a stab of incidental music while the busty damsel’s pouting the other way. After a week of hibernation to get my latest work-in-progress finished, it was hard to let go after all that intensity*. Anyway, it’s finished.
I wrote the word ‘finished’ three times in that opening paragraph.
It’s almost definitely NOT finished.
I mean, is a book ever?
I saw someone on Twitter earlier this week asking about the etiquette of swapping their self-published book with a newer version after they rewrote it, and whether Amazon allowed you to do that sort of thing, and I was wondering why he’d put something out there that wasn’t finished when I quickly realised that if I was into self-publishing I’d probably have put this latest one up for sale a year ago (I think this touches on something I’ve been meaning to articulate for a while, about why I don’t self-publish; I’ve written three books since I was last traditionally published and I could easily have released them to the world, but my fear is exactly this: maybe they’re not ready).
It’s insane how long it takes to get to the finish line sometimes. Often the book you think you’ve just written isn't the book you thought it was. It’s simply a draft. The book that exists in what's left of your head didn’t, for some reason, quite make it to the page, and there’s still a bucket of sweating to do.
It’s probably a form of mental illness, picking away at the same thing for this long, but the improvements speak for themselves (most of the time; sometimes novels run away from you and every time you solve a plot hole another one magically opens). Like any relationship, a book needs time.
But a moment comes when you just have to say ‘stop’. After all, even when it’s finished, it’s not. An editor will suggest changes. Publishers will make line edits, sometimes thousands of them. And then, and then, when it’s being ignored on the shelf by millions of potential readers, you’ll still think ‘Oh I should have put *that* in’, or ‘Why didn’t I do *that* differently?’
My books for Legend Press had multiple pairs of human eyeballs pore over them and a few errors still slipped through. These aren’t mistakes that bother me as much as they did: an eleventh hour addition to Art Teacher that resulted in the past perfect ‘sung’ being printed when it should have been the past simple ‘sang’, and a timeline issue in Blame that made me want to pulp and rewrite the lot, but no one, no one, noticed.
They’re never ‘finished’. Art requires a full stop eventually, that’s all, otherwise you end up with a George Lucas situation where you’re fiddling with works decades after they’ve been released to the world and, if you’re not careful, end up destroying something imperfectly beautiful in an attempt to polish it, like that Spanish grandmother who butchered the fresco of Jesus by painting him as a gibbon in Vaseline.
So, yeah, all of this is my humble way of rejoicing because I finished the book, after two long years. I finished it. I’m also celebrating because nine Wispa bars lasted me five days and normally those bad boys are gone in a weekend. But, mainly, the book.
I’m just going to keep telling myself that I’ve finished.
At least, until the next time I’ve finished it, it’s finished.
Finished.
*sleeping in late, procrastinating, watching old Steve Martin comedies. You know, writing.
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