This is a strange day.
Yesterday, I finally--finally--finished my final BIG edit of Unquickened. I hope it was the final big edit. I sent it to the editor last night, so unless she finds something egregious--some huge gaping hole or massive retcon--I am hoping that my next go-around on it will be minor tweaking and line editing, followed by a final-FINAL proofread in preparation for formatting.
I know I blogged a few weeks ago about "finishing" the book, but it turns out it was less finished than I thought. As I began my last read-through, I found some places where I just left huge gaps--abandoned characters, untied plotlines, timelines that made no sense... I fixed a lot more of those kinds of things than I thought I would at this point, and I had to add and rewrite more than I expected.
So while I was "done" a few weeks ago, I definitely was not as "done" as I am now.
And now... I am still not "done," but I'm more done than I ever have been.
The thing that makes it different today is that it feels done.
I did not wake up thinking about any particular section or plot problem or character issue to solve.
I did not include "edit Unquickened" on my daily plan today.
The story was not sitting open on my laptop, waiting for me.
Today, there is a strange sense of real completion that I have never had with this book.
A Brief History of a Novel Struggle
I think to understand this, I need to try to communicate how brutal this book has been to me. I started it back in 2014 during NaNoWriMo, even before I published Bloodbonded. I did my 50,000 words or whatever I managed to do that month, and then I set it aside, because I needed to finish Bloodbonded, and I knew whatever I did in book two would affect book three. And then it took another two years or whatever it was to finish book two, and because everything was falling apart for me personally at that point, working on another book was just simply not in the cards.
By the time I got back to Unquickened, so much had changed that I felt like I was returning to finish a book someone else wrote. Looking back in my files, I find bits and pieces that I cut and saved dating back to 2015 with huge gaps in the whole process. I first revealed the cover back in 2017, and my idea at that point was that having a cover would push me to keep working. I think I finally returned to really working on adding to Unquickened sometime in 2019, but then COVID and rapidly increasing my freelance commercial work and moving and all of the usual life things interfered, and...
Here we are, in 2022, about seven-and-a-half years after I first started this book.
Raising a Baby Book
Living with this book for seven-and-a-half years was very much like raising a small child, except there was less vomit and existential dread and a lot more false starts and drinking.
I tried so many things with this book over the years. I've written entire plotlines that I've completely scrapped and then had to fill in all the holes I created by cutting them. I've created characters and then deleted them only to add other characters later on. I've followed rabbit trails that turned out to be nothing important and rabbit trails that revealed solutions to major plot issues.
And this book--this book has been my constant mental companion all this time. It's been an excuse, a joke, a conviction. It's been strapped to my back as a constant weight, even when I was still finishing Bloodbonded.
And now?
To just be... done? (Or mostly done?)
It feels a little...
Empty. Hollow. Unreal.
When Your Book Goes Off to College
I know that, realistically, I will read this book at least two more times before I publish it. I'm sure there will be edits from beta readers and editors. It's not done done.
But...
It's done enough that I probably won't be tearing it apart and adding/moving/deleting/rewriting major sections at this point.
It feels a little bit like dropping my daughter at college. She was so independent and ready to move on to her next phase of life that she really didn't want or need me around--and really, she's still like that, which is why she's heading to Michigan to work at a camp over the summer and talking about moving to Texas after she graduates. But also, she still comes home to visit, and she still occasionally asks for advice, like she isn't quite done yet. We did the hard stuff for 18 years, and now she's just in the refining stage, nearly ready for final release (just as soon as she gets that nursing license).
And so... I am a bit of an empty nester at the moment. Unquickened is off at its first semester of college, I guess. I'm waiting for it to come home for Christmas so I can refine and tweak a little before I send it off for good. And I'm in limbo.
Facing the Next Steps
This is not to say I don't have things to do... First and foremost, there is a good amount of client work to do. I also need to make some book launch and book promo plans, and I need to write all the random marketing copy that's required for a new release. And finally (or not so finally), there are the other upcoming releases that I need to finish--two Ian Mac Roy stories, at least, before I pull my draft of Soultainted into Scrivener and get to work on it.
But for today--for this moment--I find myself just sort of... unmoored.
Is there a German word for this emotion? I feel like there should be. I feel like German is the only language that has the right word.
I know this will pass. I'm sure I've had a similar sensation before, but it's just been so long that I don't remember. In a couple of days, or maybe even tomorrow, I'll be ready to tackle more projects, client or otherwise.
But for now, I think it may be time to drag out the knitting needles and stitch the language center of my brain back together. Call it active rest, creative recharge, whatever--sometimes fiber is the only thing that holds me together.
In the meantime, onward we go...