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I’ve done thirteen pages today. Merry is closer to the end than I thought she was, but still a ways to go. Close enough that it gives me that illusion that if I just kept my butt in the chair and typed I could get done in a few days. Done before we leave for tour for MICAH. But it is illusion. I can do a rush of fifty pages in one session. I’ve done it before when the muse was hot, but fifty pages won’t see it done. I’ve learned not to do a mammoth push unless I am able to make the push the finish line. If I push, do some marathon and am still a few marathons short of the finish, it just seems to tire me out and make it harder to sustain a day in, day out, page count. The marathon is attractive, but if it’s not the last of the book, pushing that hard actually makes it take longer to finish. But I can feel the end of the book. I can feel it, as if my fingers were stretched through a hole, stretched as far and as hard as I could go, so the ligaments in my shoulder pop and strain and ache with the effort to reach. I can feel the brush of a cloak, cloth, cob web, something brushes my finger tips, then it’s gone. I can’t reach the end this way. Illusion, but oh, it is a tempting illusion. To be done. To be done before we have to break for tour. To be done before I have to do more and more interviews about Anita and the gang. To be done when Merry is loudest in my head and sweetly eager. By the time we get back from tour, even a short one, the book will be cold ashes in my hands. I will have to rebuild this heat, and oh, it takes so much more to rebuild a cold fire, then to keep a blaze going. So much momentum will be lost.
I used to use the analogy that writing a book was like trying to push a huge boulder up a snow covered hill. At first it looks impossible, then you try. You get a little way up, the boulder slide back down. You make some serious progress and you slip, and the boulder rolls over you, and back down the hill. There is a point in the book where you can feel the crest of the hill, and you know that if you just push hard enough you’ll be over the hump. I always spend a long time just poised like that, almost over, but not. Then, one day you push hard and the boulder just goes over the edge. It rolls over the other side of the hill, and instead of pushing it, you chase it. You chase it, chase it, and run breathless, and panting, and struggling in the snow. Not struggling to keep it moving, but struggling to be fast enough, strong enough, to keep up with your boulder. That last glorious rush at the end of a book, as your boulder goes thundering down the hill, gathering snow as it rolls, so that it’s bigger, thicker, more than you ever dreamed it would be. And all you have to do is chase it until it stops. I’m chasing my boulder as fast as I can, and it won’t be fast enough. Tour will catch me before my boulder comes to rest, and when I return, it will be solidly, stuck. It will be wedged in, not finished, just stopped. I’ll be like Archimedes, searching for a place to stand, and a lever long enough to move the world. Or that’s how it’s going to feel. Write faster, must write faster.