I Will Finish What I Started

From April, 2016

Ten years ago. About this same time. 

I finished writing a monstrously long novel that took me 21 years to write. I started it in June 1985, and finished it in March 2006. (Sunday, March 5, 2006, as a matter of fact. At 2:00 a.m.) And I was on fire then with sequel ideas, and started writing the SECOND Great American Rock Novel. 

Wrote quite a bit of it actually. I sat down and just started writing. One thing was different this time, though. I had it finished. IN MY HEAD. It's still finished. IN MY HEAD. I've just gotta write it down. I just KNEW I could have it done by the end of that summer.

Well...that didn't pan out.

There was a new grandchild. We were trying to get one daughter to college and the other one out of high school. One of those plans didn't pan out. The other turned into a challenge we didn't see coming. We ended up (sort of) living in two places. Then we moved from DeQueen for good (except for me, I still kinda lived there). Two more grandchildren were born. One child left and came back and left again and went to college and came back again. Another grandchild was born. Then another. 

The band played 92 gigs in one year. And we were still playing quite regularly until the end of 2014.

I started my PhD in 2008 and that put all my fiction writing on hold for 4 years. We moved AGAIN in 2011. There was a stalker. We ended up with ANOTHER child. SURPRISE!! Then yet ANOTHER grandchild was born. 

I had three surgeries. Not in a row, but one of them was rather extensive and painful and required six months of physical therapy. I finished my PhD. Then I sat around and stared at the wall feeling like I needed to be doing "something" but wasn't quite sure what it was. Or feeling like there was so much I wanted to do now that I wasn't working on my PhD that I didn't know where to start. So I just stared at the wall. Then I'd panic because...didn't I have a paper due??

Then I felt like I couldn't write anything but dry, pedantic academic slop. That felt REALLY weird. I had a lot still in my head, but I just couldn't sit down and do it. I started a Facebook page for the original book, hoping it would inspire me. I posted about beginning the sequel again, thinking maybe some of my "fans" would request an excerpt. October 25, 2013. One did, read it, liked it. But then I just stopped. Something else must have come up. I shared my Pinterest page for it that same day. The following February I shared my YouTube Playlist. I created a Spotify Playlist, last summer I think, and really need to share it if I can figure out how. 

I created a blog to share a chapter at a time. That was last October, I think? No, September 24. I shared it on FB, on my REGULAR page, and tagged my "fans." Then didn't get any response. I think the post got lost. FB is bad about that. Especially with "pages" you create. They can be really screwy, I think. 

Zuckerburg must die....

Anyway...I decided a couple of weeks ago to edit the first few chapters and take out the "flashback" scenes I kept coming up with. I don't know why I was doing that, but they always say when you write, just WRITE. You can always edit later. But it was becoming too much "flashback" stuff and I needed to get back to THIS story. 

Then I had prequel ideas. So that's where that stuff will end up. 

I made some other adjustments to the new chapters, and luckily they were still cohesive. I started posting them on the Sequel blog page and linked them to the Rock Opus FB page. Only my friend Christine has responded, although Glenn did like my "tweet" about the new stuff. Christine, my ORIGINAL first reader, is really liking it, so I'm taking this as inspiration to finish the damn thing. If there's only one more thing I write before I die, this needs to be it, because...it just needs to be written down. Because I think it's even better than the first one.

Now if I can just find all the places where I've scribbled scenes down on the fly. Google Drive...One Drive...little "fat" notepads floating around in whatever purse I was carrying at the time...my constant companion legal pad at work...S Notes on my phone...Notes on my iPad...Notepad files on my laptop...they're everywhere. I don't know if electronic media has made this any easier or not. I did create my new Spotify soundtrack playlist yesterday. And I KNOW I've written more ideas for that; I just have to find them.

As Kylo said to Darth's melted helmet: "I will finish what you started." And yep, my head's pretty melted.