Racing to the End

I’ve got a few more pages to go. There’s a sadness growing in my chest that’s familiar. I don’t want this to end, but I’m ready for it to end too. I remember that Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, called this feeling Self Actualizing. You know you’re doing something right if you regret finishing it. An odd contradiction. Months and months of work on this book, thousands of words written, thousands deleted, days of no progress, days of backward movement, indecision, and days of exaltation. Those days keep me going. I discovered something I wouldn’t have discovered had I not been writing that particular scene. Some character said something I didn’t see coming. Somebody did something I didn’t expect. Days of joy, days of anguish, days of boredom, and now with the end clearly in sight, days of impatience to get there.

But I’m ready for it to be over. I’m ready to leave these people between the covers of this book, and get back to my own story, the one I write by living it out. Still the sadness swells up. Kind of the way it does when I reach the end of a book I loved reading.

One of the novels I read as a young man, The Magus, by John Fowles was on my mind as I wrote Trickster. A young man on a Greek Island discovers that an old man has been manipulating his life in crucial ways. That’s a poor summary of a wonderful book, but it was that aspect, that seed of a plot that was planted long ago that grew into Trickster. I didn’t know that when I began the book. All I had at the outset was a seventeen year old girl who showed up at Thorn’s house. I didn’t know why she was there, what she wanted, or how she and Thorn were connected. As Thorn tries to answer all those questions, I simply followed behind him and watched.

Now after a couple of years I know who that girl is and why she was there and Thorn knows too. And in the process of discovering those things, Thorn had a pretty amazing adventure, and discovered some people and some secrets that would have otherwise remained hidden. And so did I.

“No thrill for the writer, no thrill for the reader.”

That’s another maxim I live by. A slight distortion of a Robert Frost quote: “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” I had a lot of thrills writing this. I know that’s no guarantee that my readers will have similar thrills, but here’s hoping readers will enjoy some of the highs I felt as the pages flew by.

Oh, and by the way, the island pictured in the featured image looks a lot like an island that plays a large role in Trickster.