This may sound crazy, but it’s true. Although it took me a few days to know it.
I wanted to be done, to send it to the publisher and be finished with the tinkering. How do you know when you’re tinkering too much?
Finally, I had a good talk with myself, stern and pointed: Isn’t this your book, the one you have been loving and nurturing, caring for, now, for nearly four years? Yes!
And then I saw it, like a frustrated lover: I don’t have to do anything. Of course. I can stop any time, walk away, declare it’s over.
But I couldn’t. Loving means I will stay, will return to tinkering, if that’s what it takes. I will put into this relationship whatever I have to give, whatever it takes to make it work. That was my promise at the start, and that is my commitment now.
So I’m back at my computer, with my newly printed pages. I start reading. Six hours later—six hours of touching and stroking, of passionate embraces and heated arguments, hours I do not notice passing—I look up again, sated and complete. Chapter 8 is ready to fly. Chapter 9 steps up to the dock, waiting to see what tomorrow will bring.