Can you imagine the kind of focus and intensity required to write a novel like Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Signature of All Things" or Donna Tartt's "Goldfinch"?

I just finished reading Gilbert's book. It was a masterpiece. I will soon read Tartt's ... my wife just finished it. She loved it.

I suspect these two authors had to be obsessed by their chosen topics ... even possessed ... for quite some time in order to write their books. And perhaps obsessed (if not possessed) long after.

It's not normal behavior, is it? All those millions who drive to work each day, sit at their keyboards, hold meetings, stand around in the hall, and go home at night ... Do they focus that intensely on anything?

Perhaps they are obsessed with something ... making money, fending off a competitor, their suspicion that their spouse is wandering or their kid is peddling drugs.

But a fantasy world? What kind of people obsess about a world they make up in their own heads? If they're older than 12, the answer is crazy people ... and writers, from novelists to historians.

I include historians because they are living in a fantasy world too, even though it is based on the facts they have gathered about real people and actual events. To write her fabulous, award-winning book "The Hemingses of Monticello," for example, can you imagine how deeply Annette Gordon-Reed must have dived into the world of Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family, as she understood (and therefore imagined) it to have been?

I did it myself, very joyfully if perhaps less competently than AGR, when I was researching and then writing "Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me," my realistic fantasy about TJ having to make it in the 21st century. I did it through the long process of revising and polishing the mss. And I'm still doing it, I'm afraid, as I keep pushing for the book to be noticed.

I just cannot believe TJRM won't find its audience. I say so publicly even though I realize the chances are that, down the road, I'll just look like a fool.

And there's the problem for a writer: how and when do you extract yourself from your fantasy world?

For me, I think the time (after more than three years of writing, revising and marketing) has come. In fact, it's overdue.

But when little things keep happening every now and then to renew hope -- another great review, an inquiry from a big agency about film rights, a Tweet from a besotted reader -- it becomes very hard to turn off the focus and intensity that were required to create the book and get it out there.

Quitting was easy with my previous novel, which I delusionally believed could find a market. It is not a fun book, as good as it is. Few were interested. And after a matter of months, I got over it. In fact, I really did not want to think about its subject matter any more. It was a relief to put it behind me.

As for the TJ book, I'm ready ... even though I am not tired of it. I'm still amazed I wrote it.

For a writer in this predicament, I think the only answer lies in find something new on which to obsess.

Trying!