Today I Finished

{video blog will follow when the author is less exhausted}

Today on October 8th, 2026, I finished a project I've been breaking against for over twenty years: I finished a novel.

I sit here both overfull and blank. The feelings are too big and I can't figure out what they are until they sort themselves off-stage left and come stumbling out across the boards.

I failed for so. Long.

Once, I had a novel idea about a Jewish girl in the Holocaust who could see the spiritual realm. I took my few chapters of Abba's Daughter to a writer's conference when I was thirteen. After presenting it to people, I was told to send in a book proposal. I froze, retreating into text-based roleplaying, and never touched Abba's Daughter again.

Once, I had an idea about fairies in a fantasy world that was affected by a writer in our own world. Around age twenty-two, I took my few chapters of The Keep to that same writer's conference. I received interest and encouragement, and promptly froze once again.

Every few years I took the idea out and tried to rewrite it from scratch. Forty thousand words, freeze, ignore it for two years. Rinse and repeat.

In all this time I was still writing. I poured out hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction because no matter how often I tried to quit writing, writing wouldn't quit me. The stories burned like coals in my gut and I had to get them out of me.

I remember sitting with my husband in the parking lot of the grocery store, once again going over every single reason I had that I just couldn't write a novel, when he pulled me up short. "We can go over each of these as many times as you like, but in the end they all amount to 'I'm too scared to write it.'"

He was right. And then he asked me to tell him a story.

In 2023, I finally started. I wanted to write about Remara, a beloved role-play character of mine from college days. I had no idea how to world-build and it seemed to me that it would be an awful lot of designing before I got to write. So I didn't design anything, I sent a character down to the world to scout it out for me, with the rough idea that this would serve as my world-building effort for whatever novel I chose to write after that.

And then she visited someone else.

And then I wrote a story about my relationship with my sister, and I realized that the Remara in that story wasn't the same Remara in the earlier parts.

The more story arcs I wrote, the more I realized Remara was shattered somehow and scattered in pieces all over this nameless fantasy world.

And then I wrote a story that encompassed evolved concepts from The Keep. And suddenly a novel was evolving under my hands from scattered stories into a coherent concept.

But I was coming to the end of 2024, and I had to stop because I found out, right quick, that I couldn't marinate in the sort of stretchy, rubbery, fluid creative juices that writing called for while I was trying to nail down て-form in Japanese.

For a year, Remara sat on ice. I don't regret the time spent studying. I don't regret the experience of living in Japan. But it hurt to be starved of bandwidth for writing.

My health broke down. I could neither study nor write for a long time. I grew as dangerously close to the darkness as I've ever been since I was a teenager. And out of that time, as I recovered, I wrote the final arc that I have not posted here: the one where Remara meets herself.

A couple weeks ago I finished that arc. I felt good. I floated around that I was basically done, I just needed to write one more chapter to end the novel.

And today I wrote that chapter. And then I realized, "Oh, that wasn't real. THIS is really done." And then I stared at the wall a good bit.

I got so used to the shame of failure. I can't tell you how many times over the years I've tried to figure out why I could never get across the finish line. To this day, I'm not completely sure, though it may have to do with my innate terror of walking into areas of my life where I don't have a map, combined with an utter lack of being able to visualize my future.

And suddenly my future is crowded with possibilities. I already have four other novel ideas, plus a deep desire to get permission for a modern language update to Hind's Feet on High Places, plus a novel based on my husband's ideas.

My husband. My co-author, despite his protestations. If my stories have any bones and make coherent sense, it's his damn fault, bless him.

I have all the feelings and none of the processing capacity right now, so I'm spilling it all here in a mess on the floor.

But I finished it.