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I write books. I finish books. As always, there’s a catch… A thirteen-year-old belief upended in a single morning’s thought.
I realized something today.
I write books, and they’re almost always part of series. The series are usually the type where each book has different main characters in a different main story, but there’s usually an overarching connection between the books of the series, so reading the books in order and reading all of them is generally helpful.
I had the realization as I was congratulating myself for becoming a finisher. When I was younger, I found it very difficult to finish books. In fact, my first book took a whole lot of years to complete, going through a bit of a metamorphosis as time passed and my understanding of craft and my own tastes in fiction changed. I started it when I was very young. Even though the book morphed into something that was completely unlike what I started with, I still consider it the same project because I kept using the same character names. But truthfully, knowing what I know now, I can look back and say that it really was two or three different books. The book I ended up with was not in the same genre and didn’t have the same sensibility as the original, nor the ones in between.
But it was my first book, and it was the first book I finished, and I just think of it as the same book. I was learning how to write. I do kind of discount all the other versions of it. My second book wasn’t the same series but was the same genre, and before I’d finished it, I’d started my third, my fourth, and my fifth book. All remain unfinished to this day. I decided I was done with writing. I moved over to writing fan fiction, which I’d never heard of until I was in my twenties, which is funny, because I can look back now and see that when I was a preteen, I wrote some of it and didn’t even know it.
Let me keep going before I get distracted and off-topic.
During my fan fiction days, I wrote many short stories, and a few little series of short and novella length stories. As I write this, looking back at those series now, I can see the same thing in them that I realized this morning about my original fiction series.
I also finished what was my first novel length fan fiction. It was over 80,000 words long, truly a novel.
So I finally had my second novel complete, even if it was just a piece of fan fiction.
This is where I was when I discovered self-publishing. It had been about one month since I wrote the last line of that fan fiction novel, and I was in the middle of another short series. It didn’t take me long to decide that maybe I wasn’t done with my original writing. I finished the story I was writing, then started writing original stories again.
I started with shorter stuff because I do like short fiction and finishing short fiction is not nearly as hard for me, but I’d finished my third full-length novel within six months.
You can’t sell what isn’t finished, so I finished them all and published as I went.
But this morning, as I was congratulating myself for becoming a finisher of novels (thirteen years later, by the way), I realized that my series are all open-ended and unfinished and if something happens to me readers are probably going to feel like they’ve been left hanging, because the series are just those kind of series where there are questions left unanswered and books left to be written. So maybe I didn’t become a finisher after all, and I just pushed off the finishing to series that go on and on forever.
So that was a moment. :D
It was a good way to start the day, huh?