Hmmmm…

Rather anti-climactic.

True, it’s not the first time in my life that something I thought was going to be a really big deal when it finally happened kinda wasn’t, but it’s still strange to realize I am totally done with the book (or as done as I’m going to bother being until a publisher wants me to change things) and yeah…it kind of feels the same as it did before I was actually totally done with the book.

That feeling, by the way, is vague anxiety mixed with a fair amount of expectation and high hopes and a dash of terror.

Or – as it has become more commonly known – same day, different shit.

At the same time, I have to wonder why it’s such a non-event?

Am I just emotionally blotto from everything I’ve been through the last few months?

Maybe that’s because I’ve already launched a plan to do the next one?

And sketched out all the chapters for said next one?

And rented a tiny Mexican casita on the southern Baja coast without a TV or any real distractions for the month of March in order to do that writing?

And so I know I’ll be right back in the maelstrom in no time at all?

Or maybe it’s because I still have to write the queries – TWO PARAGRAPHS to summarize a 136,000 word book that took me eight months. Sheesh!!! – and contact agents and get the whole thing going in the next couple weeks, and potentially that’s going to be its own massive learning curve summit.

Or maybe it’s the hour I spent battling the US Copyright office website trying to register the thing? It was singlehandedly the most ambiguous web-based experience of my life, and the apex of inefficiency and disorganization. If you’ve never had the pleasure, allow me: They somehow managed to create a user experience rich with confusion and bewilderment and “What? I mean, what?” bad instructions and and dozens of unnecessary and baffling steps. In short, it’s an electronic clusterf*ck

Anyway, no matter. There are no answers. From my perspective, the point of this pointless post was simply to say that it’s all the way done at long last, and I’m feeling no pain…nor much of anything for that matter.

Devoid of my own strength of feeling, I turn to the masters for encouragement:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau