“I hate writ­ing, I love hav­ing written.”

—Dorothy Parker

I fin­ished writ­ing the first novel in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series today. This is the first time I’ve actu­ally fin­ished a full-​length novel since the spring of 1997, when I fin­ished Between Heaven and Hell. Sounds like a big accom­plish­ment, right? So why don’t I care more?

I used to com­pletely iden­tify with the Dorothy Parker quote above. (Hardly sur­pris­ing, as she’s one of the godesses of snark.) I was all about the des­ti­na­tion, in a hurry to get the jour­ney out of the way. But in the last dozen years, a funny thing happened.

I became a writer.

Yes, tech­ni­cally, I was a writer in those early years, in that I wrote things. But I was always more con­cerned with what I was going to do after the book was writ­ten than actu­ally writ­ing it. In no small way, this is why it took me a dozen years to fin­ish writ­ing another book (even if that book itself only took six weeks to write). Because my focus wasn’t really on the writ­ing. It was on other stuff. On what my life would be like as a best sell­ing nov­el­ist, on quit­ting my day job, on get­ting to hang out in cof­fee shops all day.

Now, things are dif­fer­ent. I’m older, and I’ve spent the last fif­teen years writ­ing con­sis­tently. Mostly non­fic­tion, but writ­ing. Putting words together. In that time, I’ve devel­oped a feel for the Eng­lish lan­guage, taken a tal­ent for writ­ing and turned it into a skill. I still have a lot to learn, as evi­denced by my already grow­ing lists of things I need to fix when it comes time to revise the book, but that’s okay. The journey’s okay.

The fact that I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing my first novel in a dozen years could be best thing I could ask for in my writ­ing career. Because the biggest rea­son I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing the first book in the series is that I’m already work­ing on the sec­ond book. And the fact that I now derive more plea­sure sense of accom­plish­ment from writ­ing every day than fin­ish­ing a novel means I’ve learned to love the jour­ney. I’ve become a writer.