The author is nearing the completion of a long novel, a project that has occupied a private, almost secret space for years. Soon the work will either exit the author’s life or the author will walk away from it, and the certainty of which path lies ahead remains unclear. The tension between relief and emptiness sits in balance, a quiet gravity pulling at every morning routine. The ritual of rising at dawn, the six o’clock start, feels like a rehearsal for an event that may never fully occur. It resembles a person stepping out of a familiar home only to retreat into a locked apartment known only to the mind. The ongoing manuscript occupies a physical space that allows long stretches of immersion, four or five hours at a time, during which the world outside remains unaware of the precise activities happening within. When those hours end, the writer steps into the streets again, carrying with them a sense of unfinished dialogue with the imagined world. Sometimes powerful moments unfold in a novel as if a mystery waits to be revealed, and the writer moves through such scenes with the quiet method of someone who still prepares meals with the same calm routine for a daughter who depends on that steadiness. It is common for there to be stretches where momentum stalls, a pause in the narrative that mirrors a pause in the writer’s own sense of direction for both life and character.
Periods of quiet and retreat can feel intimidating. It becomes a question of whether a sibling relationship depicted in lines might be mistaken for a childless marriage, and whether such confusion could exist even in ordinary life. Doubts arise about likeness and resemblance, a question of whether two people who share a life together also share a hidden, unspoken confusion. Writing unfolds on the edge, as if one walks a cliff with eyes closed, where the possible slip and the fall are always looming. Many novels fail at this precarious balance, turning into dull, decaying stories because they fall into the trap of mere lines of life that do not breathe. The world is crowded with unsteady narratives when lives become stitched together with fragments rather than full, integral experiences. It may be true that a reader could be challenged by a text, or that life itself could interrupt the imagined plot. The head, where both stories and lives often rot, is a place that might demand radical cleaning, sometimes with the most radical tools imaginable to clear away the debris and reveal a truer shape of the thing being told.
What concerns the current novel is that it has not lost its vitality. It has not surrendered to rot or disintegration. The author feels a sense of victory, achieved at the expense of the bond with the manuscript itself. The decision is made to stop reading and revising, to stop chasing perfection and to allow the work to stand on its own terms. When the moment of being released arrives, the author will rise at dawn, pretend to head to the office, and send the manuscript to the publisher to negotiate the terms of a deal that may never fully settle into a single, final form. In that sense, the narrative finds a resolution through constraint, a letting go that honors what the text has accomplished while acknowledging that a larger story waits beyond the current pages.