Will It Ever Get Done?

I've spent the past few weeks trying to get a novel ready for self-publication.  I --

No, that's not really true.  It's more like four years since I first shared it with people, letting it see the light of day.  So, yeah, I've spent the past four years trying to --

Well, no, that's not right, either.  I actually started the stupid thing about a decade ago.  That was when I sat down and said, "Hey, you know, this whole book writing thing?  I think I could do that."  So I sat down, played with some ideas, and started.  I had no clue what I was doing, but it was fun, making these people up out of thin air and putting them in awful situations. 

If only I knew then what I knew now, I might never have let them emerge from my overly-active imagination and come into being on the blank page.

If you've read any of my Saturday Summaries, then you know I have this series of books I've been working on: The Sadonian Chronicles.  In a nutshell, it's about this kid from Earth who gets dragged against his will across vast stretches of time and space to the country of Sadonia, where he has to help save the world from an evil wizard.  Despite Sadonia being Heaven-knows-where, Phillip can speak and understand people just fine, and indeed he seems to have a strange relationship with this place that he really shouldn't have. 

The whole thing started out with me making a list of twenty-five things: seemingly random and unrelated objects and people, which I then started trying to tie together to lay the skeleton for a story.  That was in the beginning.  Since then, the story has never been far from my mind, even in the times I haven't been working on it.  The crazy thing is, even when I haven't been working on it ... I have been working on it: discovering new things about the world, the characters, seeing future scenes, conversations that have to take place.  I started with that stupid list of twenty-five things, and I now know so much about the people and the place and the history of this fictional world that I have to finish writing it, whether I want to or not. 

I've thought about packing it in a couple times.  More than a couple.  Every time I make the decision, though, Phillip and Eslin and Atrina come knocking at the door of my consciousness and demand to be let loose.  I don't mean that it a metaphorical sense (though I wish I did), I mean there are actually these metaphysical representations of these characters who appear before me like a murdered man's ghost before a Shakespeare character and demand -- not ask, demand -- to be let loose once more.  The way I know this isn't just me any more is the fact that they tell me things I don't know, in words I wouldn't use -- these characters, whether I want them to be or not, are alive in my head.  Their thoughts and feelings are their own ... and the only way to purge myself of them is to write down their story, clear through to its conclusion.

Will it ever get done?  Yes, I'm sure it will, but I find myself constantly asking, "When?"  I've diddled and dithered on this book for nearly a decade, and it's almost -- almost -- ready to be turned loose on an unsuspecting public.  I've worked on more than just this one book in that time, but still -- at the rate I'm going, I'll get the last book released by the time my grandkids are graduating college (and for those of you keeping score, no, I don't have any kids yet). 

Music and composing are easy for me -- I work on a piece for a day or three or a week, and it's done.  I send it off for publication, get a response in an hour or a week or three months, review a proof, and it's published -- end of story.  With this, I'm so far from the ultimate finish line that I have no idea when I'll reach it ... but I also know I'm so far from the starting line that I daren't go back or stop.  My only hope is that, in the end, this all will have been worth it.  I'm at the place now where it doesn't matter to me who reads the books or how well-received they are: I just have to write them for my own reasons.  Though it take me the rest of my life, I'll keep writing, keep revising, and keep moving my characters further on their paths.

And yes, in the end, I will get it done.