At last. At long, long last. It is done.

A few nights ago, I made the final edit to my brain-baby, my first-ever novel-length work of fiction (science fiction, to be precise), my “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I got the idea for it way back in 2015, if not before, and I started to slowly but surely gather the information on all sorts of myths, fun historical anecdotes, and just about anything else I could blame on a careless time traveler. (There’s quite a lot of that, it turns out.) Then I started scribbling my first draft, and then…

Workaholism. Years and years of it. Zero stars, two thumbs down, would not recommend. You can see it even on the sideline of this blog: there were hardly any entries in 2018, and that was pretty indicative of my slump in creativity and, to be honest, overall higher brain function. (85-hour workweeks will do that to you.)

There was another attempt to resume my novel in 2020, when there wasn’t much else to do. Soon enough, the fear of covid and the pressure of negative news extinguished even that.

Ironically, I should credit my slow-paced year at the nearby community college last year with giving me that final push. By the end of each day, frustrated with the pace of school, I would spend an hour writing my novel and an hour studying genetics (thanks for the free course, MIT!) just to feel I’ve done something – anything – productive at all with my day.

And then an old college friend of mine published his own sci-fi trilogy, and that filled me with all the conviction I needed. Finally, here was a real-life person from my own social circle who managed to get a bona fide book deal! Without him, my own novel might not have happened. Thanks, D-Clark!

And so… It’s done. It feels unbelievably strange to no longer have that pressure on the back of my mind, that guilt of procrastinating when I could be writing and sharing my unusual take on time travel with the world. All in all, this 104,000-word novel took me 9.5 years – almost half of my adult life. How weird is that? The other day, a friend of a friend lost his video game account – some sort of MMORPG where you can grow your own empire and level up from a peasant to an emperor. His account got deleted because he instigated an online fight with another player outside the game. He’d spent 15 years of his life on it – his entire adult life. And now it’s gone, deleted without trace. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like… But it’s also a startling contrast: different people spend their free time doing vastly different things. Some exercise to the point of winning athletic competitions or bodybuilding contests. Some build virtual empires that might get deleted with a single click. Some write huge sci-fi novels. Choose your own adventure, eh?

This feels quite strange. I have nearly infinite free time and a bulletproof self-esteem, so I will keep submitting my novel to literary agents until one of them accepts me as a client (hi, agent-friend! thank you for checking out my blog!!) and then helps me find a publisher. I am convinced that at some point in the future, my book will end up on store shelves. (No more Kindle samizdat, not ever.) By having written my book, by having contacted my first prospective book agent, I’ve set in motion a chain of events that may never be undone. I have no illusions of awards or mass recognition, but I will be a published author as the result of my actions, and there’s no way to scuttle back when that happens. One way or another, a whole new chapter of my life will begin.

This sensation is similar to the time I made a very big (and, ultimately, successful) investing decision in 2020, or left my ridiculously safe (but stressful) Amazon job in 2021, after 11.5 years with the company. It’s partly fear, partly excitement, partly realization that once I take this step, there is no going back. It is a unique, terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating feeling, and it is absolutely goddamn beautiful.

Here is to the future.