Is This The End?

6/7  I told Marshal Latham yesterday that I was 97% finished with "Sins of a Sidekick," and an hour or so later, I was on my way to the library to see what more I could do.  For once, I didn't dick around on the internet (except to ask it the Spanish words for a couple of terms, so I could make up New Mexico town names), and when the damned over-loud "The library will close in fifteen minutes..." announcement blared, I was about a page away from those two words, so I turned on the speed.

I was there, at the climax, where Ben's adventure is over, and who knows what the next one will hold?*

But, it didn't feel the way it usually does--which is a bright and hopeful sense of accomplishment, a feeling that while I have failed in virtually all arenas of life**, there's this one little corner where I have created something that didn't exist before, and just maybe the world is the better for it.

Instead, I felt nothing.  I had written "the end," but it felt like I had typed it by accident, or way too soon, like I was a liar or a fraud.  Huh.

6/8  So, on Saturday, I went back to the library, opened the file again, and expanded those hastily-written last three paragraphs into a page and a half, pacing out the ending a bit, filling in more detail, tossing in three more lines of dialogue.

And it still didn't feel good, or complete, or satisfying.

Huh, again.

I've mentioned it before: getting to write "the end" is usually the most satisfying part of my writing process.  It's the equivalent of hiking to a high peak and then being able to look down and see just how far you've climbed, or teaching a child to read over a period of months or years then watching him/her read the subtitles aloud on Takashi Miike movies, or working a long stretch of overtime and then seeing the sizable bump in your next paycheck, or summoning a being of unfathomable rage and hate from the netherworld and then watch it attack the neighborhood village, raping and terrorizing and eating children right and left.  

But not this time.

And what does that mean?  

Does it mean that the story is not good?***

  It might.

Does it mean that I've lost that lovin' feeling, oh oh that lovin' feeling, 'cause it's gone, gone, gone?

  It might.

Does it mean that the story is, in fact, not at an end?

  Sure, but I always do a second draft (or a third, or a fourth), but that doesn't keep me from feeling satisfaction when I write those two words.

I just found this strange.  If it don't bring you either joy or a paycheck . . . is it even real?

Something to think about.

6/9  Oh, and it's probably the second-longest gestation I've ever had on a project I've written, from starting it to actually finishing it.  When I completed "Balms & Sears" back in 2022, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief, because I started that one in 2016 or 2017 . . . and I'd pushed through to the end.

Which reminds me, I vowed to release that this year, and it's already June 7th or 9th or something.  Better get to work.

Guess it isn't the end.

 

*Well, I know, obviously, since I wrote it in 2018, but I was being poetic in asking the question.

**Including blogging, most likely.

***Debatable, right?  But probably, yeah, it isn't good.