I wrote the last chapter of The Gripping Beast last night. Today I put on the finishing touches, go over it one last time to smooth out any rough spots where I cut, added and rewrote, and send it away. And that will be the end of The Thing In The File Cabinet, my personal Bluebeard’s Closet.
This Beast has been hanging around for about 10 years. I started it and my true voice erupted onto the pages. I was writing a storyline that was clearly erotic – capture/bondage sex was an important part of the plot – but it was a romance. And it had time-travel. And Norse mythology coming to life and marching around. I sent out queries and the silence was deafening. I got to 55,000 words and lost my nerve. I didn’t know what to do with this Weird Book That Nobody Wanted. I didn’t know how to finish it. I filed it away and it haunted me.
Leaving that story unfinished was like putting on eyeliner and mascara on one eye and going out in public. It was embarassing. What kind of writer invests that much time and effort in a manuscript and then just shoves it in a drawer? What kind of brain comes up with stuff like that in the first place? I felt like a failure. I felt like a person who wrote weird books and it would be my epitaph: “She wrote weird books nobody wanted. And she kept going on about this Viking time-travel Norse mythology erotic story that she never finished.”
And then along came Samhain, a publisher interested in weird books nobody else wanted, and I knew Crissy would at least let me down gently without implying that I needed medication for even proposing a book like The Gripping Beast, so I pitched it to her. Wonderful. Send it in. Um, it’s not finished. In fact, it’s really rough. This is rough draft, okay? Here’s four chapters. Editor responds, I really love it. I’m sending a contract.
A dream. A nightmare. Because now I had to haul it out and fix it and finish it. And it was a hard, hard job. But I did it, and now Bluebeard’s closet has been scoured out and swept clean and my guilty secret, my private failure, is a finished book.
It might not be great literature. It might not be the book readers love best, or even the one I love best. But by God, it is a triumph on a scale nothing else compares to so far. And now my epitaph can read, “She always finished her books.”
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