My, that’s a provocative title, no? Well, it’s nothing like that… it’s simply that I’m finally getting back to finishing my novel, Brave Men Run.
See, July has been just awful when it came to writing. There was just too much pressure from the Cursed Day Job, too many outside things taking not just my time but, more importantly, my energy. Today, a few days before the end of the month and more than thirty days since I’ve written a word of the book, I’m just starting to feel halfway normal.
Yesterday I dipped into the book and read the last few scenes. And I felt like I could get back to it. I felt the trepidation slipping away, and started to hear my characters speak again.
Trepidation? Yep. See, I’m in the last third… maybe the last quarter… of a piece of work that’s been building in me for better than fifteen years. Now, I don’t say that to create an inflated sense of the book’s literary merit — this is a light piece of science fiction, a coming of age story with a helping of innocence lost, not The Remembrance of Things Past.
But yeah, I feel a certain fear as I approach the work these days. Fear that I don’t know what I’m doing. Fear that the ending that’s in my head just won’t play on the page. Fear that it’s gonna suck.
I’ve never finished a novel before. However, I’ve never made it this far before, either. I know I have issues with finishing creative works, especially written ones. Not sure what that’s about, but I think it may be a general fear of failure. If the work is never finished, I don’t have to worry if it’s ever any good, right?
Well, I’m gonna finish this. I have to.
And today, I’m gonna get back to writing the damn thing.