Still plugging away on editing the novel.  It’s funny.  Now that I’ve more or less written it I don’t have that feeling of monumental accomplishment that I imagined.  I spent my whole life up to this point wanting to write this book and now that I have written it I have to admit that it doesn’t really feel like a life’s work.  This is not because I’m unhappy or dissatisfied with the work; I’m not.  I like it.  I think it’s good.  But it just doesn’t feel like the artistic summit I imagined it would after so many years of wanting it so badly.  It still feels like something I needed to do and I’m really glad I did.  I’m going to see it through to completion but I have to be honest and say that there really aren’t any feelings of catharsis or epiphany.  I am happy to have turned a wish into reality but now that it’s done (in terms of the writing) I guess it just no longer seems like such a big deal.  I’ll still publish it but I think my emotional investment in it has changed.  Even if it is well received I have the feeling that it was a milestone on a longer journey and not a finish line.  Perhaps I was supposed to write it so that I would become a writer and then…well, that remains to be discovered, now doesn’t it?  Maybe I was supposed to write a book so that I would grow into being comfortable and assertive with a gift but the book itself wasn’t necessarily the grand purpose of the gift.  Perhaps it was a learning tool, like training wheels. 

I’ve said at least a hundred times that it was never going to be about making money and it still isn’t.  I wrote it for me.  Only now that I’ve written it I guess I no longer feel like I need it.  I’m pleased and proud and all that jazz but I’m just sort of over it, as odd as that may sound.  As I am re-reading it and editing it I see how I put my heart into it but now my heart feels ready for something else.  Ironically, this feeling of detachment seems to help the editing process quite a bit in terms of objectivity.  I’m told most artists find it impossible to be objective about their work.  I guess it gets easier once you outgrow the work (if that’s what I’ve done here).  So now the motivation to get it all edited and tidied up is so that I can be free for whatever comes next.  I have no clue what that might be.  Maybe there is another book waiting; maybe something completely different.  I don’t know.  The joy of doing what I do is still as strong as ever but I guess I have just begun to measure it differently.  It isn’t measured in novels anymore, if it ever was.  Come to think of it, why measure it at all? 

I always loved that line in the movie Frida when Diego Rivera tells Frida that his opinion of her work shouldn’t matter because, “If you’re a real painter, you’ll paint because you can’t live without painting.”  I guess I no longer need to have Write A Novel out there as an impetus to write.  Now that I have done it I can see that it never was a good reason to be writer.  Being a writer because I don’t want to live without writing is the reason I’m doing it now.  Whether it turns into books or something else or nothing else, the joy of letting myself write didn’t change when I checked the Write A Novel box.  I am no happier and no sadder as a writer so it wasn’t the promise or the fruition of the novel making the magic.  My old yoga teacher used to coax me not to practice goal-oriented yoga but to practice process-oriented yoga if I wanted it to be more than simply a performance.  Perhaps that’s why I don’t seem particularly elated that I wrote a novel.  At some point I began practicing process-oriented writing and stopped worrying about the outcome of it all.  I know it must sound terribly anti-climactic but I’m not disappointed.  I’m satisfied that I finally did what I meant to do but now that it’s done I feel that it wasn’t ALL I was meant to do. 

I don’t know what else.  I don’t have to know right now.  It will come to me.  I’ve still got lots of editing to finish in the meantime.