The End

Saturday saw me write this definitive text…and I got to say I am trepeditiously pleased. A little over a year in the abstract making and I have a trilogy on my hands! Final word count was 300,074, with page # at 619 enough to see each book comfortably with 200+ pages – of course that’s just cursory, I still have the whittling and honing of editing to do and that always gives or takes!

Now I say trepeditiously, not because I’m uncertain but rather it’s a bittersweet thing to be done with something that’s been so much an active part of life, to think I’m no longer going to interact with these characters in the “unknown” of their journeys and lives, that something I have endeavored to accomplish and meet is now tangibly my own…well it’s humbling and in it’s own way melancholy, but the kind of soft/sweet melancholy that looks back on something so vivid and full of life having lived and made it through – I mean do we ever really believe there is another side until forged by the trenches and embraced by its sudden warmth? It’s like engage, struggle, struggle, feel, bleed *BAM* breakthrough, hello other side! Was I really ready to say goodbye? Ya know, still in surreal disbelief of it kinda.

It all really came together though, in a subtle way too, like I was just writing until whatdoyaknow, the end. I guess there’s always this part that thinks it’s going to be some dynamic dramatic climatic thing, but it just was…on the wings of letters and meaning, the end.

So yeah, I’m on to editing, which is also a jive worthy process that allows me to revisit in chronological sequence parts that, who knows, maybe even I’ve forgotten!😂

---

 

what you just read above was the organic first text of a writer having just written “The End.” after a little over a year dedicated to writing my first novelized trilogy.

Mind you it wasn’t my first time or experience with these words. I have bid plenty a farewell in my time, and it is always the same sort of dance – though possibly making less of an impact then the adieu to a process that was a little over a year in its daily endeavor, since they tended to be scripts, or short stories, or ongoing sequentials – this was my first time ending a book series.

Characters I didn’t just visit, but lived with. We established a routine, we got comfortable with one another, and came to expect and accept each other as an intricate place holder in our lives. Now, suddenly, there will be no new interactions. No more surprise encounters, or new things to discover in our relationship.

For all intents and purposes the romance is dead.

Now, I’m not trying to be a killjoy or anything like that. There is triumph in these words, their is mastery, and accomplishment. All I am trying to convey and break down as I look over these raw emotions of text, is what might be missed by those looking in.

When you are a creative coming to the end of a project you can feel the contradicting emotions of a parent watching their child leave home. This was a piece of you, you created this, and now you have to let it go. You are a mixture of pride and despondence. For you are going to have to pick up the pieces of your life, to fill the gaping whole of what you dedicated you time, thoughts, and energies to, with something else equal to the task of your intense love.

That’s a lot of wayward emotion pulling at your heart and mind strings. You can feel adrift, ungrounded, and alone well at the same time be excited, celebratory, and blessed.

Maybe I feel too much. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I just am too much. But at the time of ending, I was shaking in excitement – this is it, this is what I’ve been working so hard to achieve – but reserved in its reality. It was surreal. This is it – Suddenly those words take on a new meaning when the period is placed. This is it. It is over.

Yes there is editing, but that is like looking over picture books, reliving the experience from a distance, from the other side, not side by side, not in it. You are retelling the story, not creating it as you go. It is wonderful, but it is different, and sometimes you are not ready for the sting of that difference.

The end, is just a little harder when brought about by friends.

Distance makes the heart grow founder because in time something else has filled the absence of what has left. When you are a writer, you have to keep going. After the creation comes the technical coldness of what needs to be done in order to make it viable.

Yes that seems to suck the joy out of editing, but really when editing you can get sucked back into that world. The newness of end only makes it harder because you used to belong, now you just visit, and that’s what you struggle to rationalize.

The best advice I could give another writer is to recognize these feels for the blocks they can cause. I know part of my struggle can come in when I get hyper focused on one project at a time. It can be hard to jump into a new one, to get the feeling of another after being so intensely intertwined with another, but it helps – when possible – to have another creative project going as you focus on the technical of your last. To have an escape into the creative side of things, when spelling, grammar, and continuity are doing your head in and causing you to doubt and second-guess what it is you have dedicated so much time and energy to in the first place.

So cheers to the end, but try to make sure it comes when you are in the middle of something else!