Finally. It's done.
After four long years of frustration and anxiety, Blackspire is finished.
I've written about this novel a few times in the past. It's not too much of an exaggeration to call Blackspire the "white whale" I've been chasing after obsessively, often to the detriment to my physical and psychological health. I once joked on Twitter that everyone will know I've finished the book when I'm chasing after the pages in the street with a harpoon yelling, "From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!" There were long periods of time over the last few years when I could feel this book weighing down on me, refusing to let me feel a moment of satisfaction with any accomplishment so long as it remained unfinished. I've been working on it for so long that I almost can't remember my writing life before it existed. There were moments when I stopped working on it, moments when I believed it would never be completed, that it would be that glaring, failed project that haunted me forever.
And now, just like that, it's done.
I thought I would be happier about reaching this point, honestly. When I finished the first draft, I barely had time to think about it before I launched into the editing process. After I completed the editing and revising process a few days ago, I should have been able to celebrate the occasion.
But that hasn't really happened. Not yet, anyway. Maybe it just hasn't hit me yet. Or maybe I've simply transferred my anxieties surrounding the writing process to the publication process. After all, it won't do me much good to celebrate finishing the book if it never sees the light of day in print. While I would like to say I derive satisfaction as an author from simply writing something, that's not the case at all. I don't really trust my own judgement about anything I do, which leaves me depending upon external sources of validation. It's not a healthy thing, honestly, but I've just had to accept that I'm wired this way. For better or worse, publication matters to me. Simply writing the book isn't enough; I need to know that someone else thinks it's good enough to publish. So until I sign on the dotted line of a publication contract for Blackspire, it's going to be hard for me to get too excited about finishing it.
Maybe I should give some context for this book. I started Blackspire back in 2012, about six or seven months before The Walls of Dalgorod was accepted for publication. After finishing Dalgorod, I finally knew I could actually write a complete novel, but I didn't know if I could write one that anyone would publish. After writing the outline for a book I never started, I got to thinking about ways to subvert conventions in the fantasy genre. Specifically, I wanted to get away from stereotypical protagonists. Somehow, I hit upon the idea of a protagonist who literally shoveled shit. From there (and a dose of inspiration from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station), I started writing.
The problem, of course, was that I started writing without an outline, which meant I had no idea where the story was going.
That initial decision wound up causing me four years of anguish. In the time it took me to finally complete Blackspire, The Walls of Dalgorod was published, Mirona's Law was written and accepted for publication, and I recorded four albums of electronic music. Every time I started to make any headway on Blackspire during that time, some problem with the plot reared its ugly head and ruined any writing momentum I had. After finishing the first few chapters, I knew I was in trouble and needed to plot out where the story was going. Over the course of four years, I went through at least thirty variations of the plot, many of which never even managed to get to the end of the story before falling apart. Every five or six iterations, I thought I'd solved the puzzle, only to realize later that I'd created as many problems as I'd fixed. It was maddening. I probably spent more time bashing my head against that outline than I did writing all of Mirona's Law, which practically wrote itself by comparison.
But after a lot of work, I finally cracked the plot. Remarkably, despite featuring five point of view characters and several minor characters who all intersect at various points throughout the story before finally coming together for the climax, the narrative flows pretty well and "works," for lack of a better term. All those hours of feeling like I was juggling knives just to hold the plot together finally paid off, even when I decided at the last second that the best way to solve one of my biggest problems was to create an entirely new POV character with an entirely new and slightly complicated subplot.
One of the most interesting byproducts of this process was seeing how my writing has changed over time. When I sat down to revise and edit, I realized that Blackspire spanned almost my entire writing career. The earliest chapters were written after The Walls of Dalgorod was completed, but before that book went through the editorial process with the publisher. I learned a lot during that process, and some of those lessons were evident in Blackspire's middle chapters. The latter portions were written much more recently and feature even less of those old bad habits (although a few new ones cropped up along the way). While the early sections of the novel needed a lot of work, the editing became much easier as I went along because I literally became a much better writer along the way. This was most evident when chapters written for the new POV character appeared alongside some of those early chapters. I could still see the similarities in style, but there was an obvious improvement.
So where does that leave me now? 
Well, for all the anxiety I'm feeling over the book's uncertain future, at least the damn thing is finished. There's a sense of relief that comes with finishing any project, and I'm no longer lying awake at night wondering if I'll be working on it for the rest of my life. On the other hand, knowing that the book was always waiting there for me to finish it provided some measure of creative predictability. If I didn't have anything else to do at any given moment, I could always work on Blackspire. Now that it's done, I need to find a new project to focus on.
The situation reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the movie Finding Nemo. During the end credits, the movie cuts to the fish from the dentist's office escaping across the street and into the harbor. There's a long beat where they look out across the water and slowly realize that while they've escaped to the ocean, they're still stuck in plastic baggies. The blowfish then asks, "Now what?", before the scene cuts back to the credits.


So...now what?
I guess I'd better start figuring that out.