The End of Something

Mango blouse
Aritzia skirt (similar)
J. Crew heels
Sezane bag (similar)
Rayban sunglasses
& Other Stories necklace (similar)
Delphine Pariente necklace
Madewell rings
Urban Outfitters earrings (similar)
Location: The Great-West Life Building – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I can’t seem to finish my third book. I could, if I wanted to – if I could exert enough force over my decidedly undisciplined self to simply sit down and put pen to paper. The plot is mine, after all – I know, beat by beat, the events that need to take place to end the story. But chapter thirty has sat, half-complete, for more than two weeks. I walk past my Moleskine notebook in its place on my coffee table every day, but I judiciously avoid opening it every time.

Years ago, when I was in a mock rage about the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to move a chapter of book two forward, Topher made a suggestion that, at the time, seemed a bit melodramatic. “Maybe you’re afraid to finish,” he suggested, “because once these books are done, you don’t know what comes next.”

At the time, I scoffed. Or at the very least, I politely told him that he was reading too much into my frustration. But it looks, increasingly, like he might have been onto something.

This weekend, I will celebrate the official launch of my second novel, Before the World Opened, at McNally Robinson. I haven’t prepared any notes, because there is no need – I know exactly what I will say. I will talk about the red notebook that I bought at the nearby Wal-Mart half a lifetime ago and the two short chapters of a book I never intended to finish that I penned inside. My friend will get credit for pushing me, insisting she needed to know the end because those chapters ultimately became the book I published this year. I will make a joke or two about how I have now lived most of my life with my characters, and how people close to me have had no choice but to live with them, too.

I also know what I won’t say – that already, launching the second book feels like the end of something. Or at least the beginning of the end of it. And it has been such a long time coming that I don’t know what my life without these books, and the characters who inhabit them, will look like.

When I was in university, studying writing, my teachers often repeated the phrase, “You have to kill your darlings.” This phrase encapsulates a commonly held belief among writers, that our best work is not written about the characters we love best. It’s hard for me to say objectively if that’s been true for me. I don’t know that I loved the characters I’ve spent so long writing about, at least at first. I was ready to forsake them at the first sign of writer’s block, after all. But some many years later, there is no denying my attachment to them. The end of my third book is the end of their story. I don’t know what happens to them after… and I don’t know what happens to me, either.