How does it feel to finish a novel?

How Does It Feel To Finish a Novel?

By Aaron K. Bowen

Well… which one?

I finished drafting my first full-length fantasy novel in early July of 2023.  After, my family and I went out to eat at a local restaurant called The Turtle.  There, over a plate of truffle fries, I tried to soak in what it was that I had accomplished.

Much like earning my black belt, the realization that you come to is that you’re still just you on the other side of it.  No band plays, no trumpets blare, the sky doesn’t open and bathe you in golden light… you’re still just you.

Don’t get me wrong.  Your people are proud of you, but mostly in kind of an abstract way.  The book wasn’t in their minds, taking up the vast space that it had to for you to lay it onto the page.  They understood that you were writing.  They saw you struggle, grow excited, struggle, and then feel the enormous relief of finishing.  But… that’s probably all.

And that’s okay.  You did this thing for you.  Or, at least, I hope you did.  You’ve dreamt of this, if you’re anything like me, since you were a child.  You wrote your first ‘novel’ at the age of twelve.

The really hard part wasn’t finishing the first one.  It was failing to finish the second one.

You see, in the summer of ‘24, I thought I would be drafting my second novel, The Immortal Cobbler of New Palermo.  

That didn’t end up happening.

I won’t go into why it didn’t happen, but the meat of the matter is that some events transpired in my personal life that poisoned the well from which I’d drawn that narrative.  It was, to be frank, kind of a dark time for me.  To make it worse, I failed at creating the rhythm I was counting on to prove to myself that the first, rejected novel was merely a stopping point along the road to a career as a traditionally published author.

Granted, there were problems.  For one thing, Immortal Cobbler wasn’t very tightly plotted, and I found myself struggling through the midpoint-slog; never a good sign.  The tone was also too broken, too injured for me to be able to write it in that depressed state.

So, when I jumped forward to Babitha and Athalie’s first detective adventure, I was surprised and relieved to find the words flowing easily.  They are fun.  And funny.  And, in their own way, broken as well.

So, Thunder and Velvet (which incorporated some key plot points from Immortal Cobbler) was a redemption moment for me.  I’m proud to have written it; it shows that I can do this thing.  I can do it, and I can do it efficiently.

No lie: I have nineteen more novels already outlined, and I’m already tapping my fingers, thinking about the next one.

Because, at the end of it all, I’m still just me.  And will continue to be.

If you’re a writer, I’d love to hear your own “first finish” moment—triumphant, anticlimactic, or somewhere in between. If you’re a reader, thank you for being part of the reason we keep doing this strange, quiet thing.