I really hate this part

I, honestly, hate being done with a story. While you’re working on it, it’s such a wonderfully frustrating thing that you can think about, daydream scenes for, and occupy lulls in life with finding out what happens next in.

When it’s over you don’t have that. This is when the Work starts. This is when you need to drag yourself to the computer and start proofreading, revising, polishing, considering.

This is the part where it’s easy to break down crying, certain beyond any doubt that the 110000 words before you are horrible, worthless trash and ought to not just be deleted but data wiped (this is deletion with extreme prejudice for those of you not very computer savvy).

This is the point where it’s hard to really want to start the next book because you feel like you really ought to feel a little more confidence in the previous book – at least in terms of a series – before you start. This is so you feel more confident of the contents of the previous book available for referencing back to in the next narrative. But it’s also hard to start another project because the insecurities and shoulda-coulda-woulda imps are invading your mind, causing you to see every scene of this newly completed novel in a distorted, mangled form that makes you positive you must rewrite it, but doing so would force a rewrite of everything after … truly, finishing a novel is agonising.

True, being stuck behind an impenetrable wall of writer’s block is no picnic either, but there’s nothing like the existential crisis wrought by the completion of a story. Or worse, the completion of, not just a book, but a Story – the whole series, a standalone book, etc – when you then stare at the finished pages and thing, Dear God, what in Hell am I to do now?!

Needless to say I have not yet started on Book 3, nor picked Færie Patrol back up, or anything of that sort. This means I’m terribly bored, especially at work, but I know I need the break. I also know I’ll refuse to listen to me, as I’m sure I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about; I doubt not at all that in a week or two I’ll have a pen in hand staring at paper and contemplating the eternal question, “what comes next?” it probably won’t be book three though, because I really am nit as happy with Ready or Not‘s last couple of chapters to want to start a book which may need to begin in a way that inseparably ties to the ending of its predecessor.

Hopefully I’ll veg out for part of this break I’m taking and reset my neurons a bit before I get back to work. Nintendo and DVDs are healthy things, sometimes.