Endings

The Hawk, placemats, finishing a lap quilt.... These are the endings I'm pondering today.

First, the book: The Hawk. All 266 chapters of it. LOL. So I completed my read-through/revisions/edits yesterday afternoon after a marathon session that has lasted a few days. I really wanted to finish it, wanted to know how I'd reached The End, wanted to.... I wanted to savor and inundate myself with a cast of many that seriously eased the transition from wife/mum/daughter to wife/mum/grandmother/both parents passing away in the course of nearly five years. I started writing The Hawk in October of 2013, finished it in April of 2018, released it in parts (thirteen of them) as I wrote it, then unpublished those and re-released it in three volumes in 2020, then unpublished that early this year. I began the latest edits on 10 January, noting in my journal the temperature at 8 p.m. that night was 44 degrees Fahrenheit (Brrr!), hoping that by the end of this year I'd have read through the entire book. Which I have, with three months to spare.

Maybe most of this post is going to be about that series, or what is now a collection of ten novel-length books. Quickly I'll mention the placemats; four of six are completely finished, two left in need of bindings attached. Wrapping up the lap quilt requires me to sew together the back, make the sandwich, baste it, etc. That etcetera might include some machine quilting because I want to get this lap quilt SORTED, and running it under the presser foot is far faster than hand-quilting it. We shall see, and by we I mean Present and Future Me.

This isn't an actual Eden block, but it's the same size. Eden blocks have a hexagon in the center, surrounded by jewels, then diamonds. But you get the idea.

Anyway.... So yeah, I'm in a mood to tie loose ends. Those placemats have been floating around the office for months, the lap quilt nearly that long. I'm also considering diving deeply into my Eden EPP quilt; it needs a dozen and a half more blocks, like the one pictured above, eight half-blocks, then for me to decide if I'm going to make my own papers for edge pieces or use what came with the kit, but are small and would require me to slice off edges of the blocks used along the sides. Future Me is leaning toward making the papers, probably out of poster board, which I did for the Cherish quilt I made for my youngest daughter about five years ago. I'm with Future Me on this, although that task is not one which I'll consider immediately.

Immediately.... Immediately is how I've felt the last few days when reading The Hawk. Immediately I was drawn into that last book, #10. Immediately I recalled how the end of the story had been in my mind for a good long while, but when writing a tale with heaps of characters, everyone deserves a send-off, so the story lengthens, and.... And over those five years, 2013-2018, I became a grandmother four times over, nursed my dad and mom, then bid them adieu. I learned to sew along the way, hehehe, which enabled me to feel productive when I wasn't writing, because I was busy with adorable grandbabies as well as grasping how life changes due to new family inclusions and deaths of long-beloved members.

The Hawk became for me a test of sorts; could I truly work up the gumption to complete it? Would I eternally regret starting to publish it if I didn't finish it? That was an underlying...not fear but certainly an impetus to make damn sure I found The End. I found The End two months before my mom died unexpectedly of cancer, and I will always be grateful that I finished it before she passed, because I can't honestly say if I would have had the guts or sense or heart to write it once she was gone.

Now I have some decisions to make about said series, in when to start releasing it, and will I attempt a print version. I have steered clear of print versions of my books for a while, because inevitably I tinker with them, which isn't a big deal with ebooks, just upload the new version. Yet with print novels, there's a process that requires, well, work. Okay, more work than ebooks need. Draft2Digital has print novels as an option, but I am not yet transitioned to D2D, so.... So buttons. Yup, that about sums up that.

Past Me urges print versions, but she's still writing The Hawk, or she's hand-stitching the initial EPP hexie quilt, so she's full of enthusiasm. While Future Me hints toward those homemade papers for the Eden quilt, she's very tight-lipped about turning The Hawk into printed books. Some aspect of tangible creative output seems to be okay is the vibe she's currently exhibiting, so I smile, not pressing for her opinion further. Honestly, it's enough to have the revisions completed, because I still need to format all those books, perhaps think up additional titles for each one. Each one is how I can now consider them, ten books' worth of story written in four and a half years amid massive personal change and familial upheaval. Part of me wishes I could link to the story, all this blah blah blah about an endeavor that has no viable footprint other than my own musings. This is a longer than normal post, guess I needed to get my Hawk ya-ya's out.

It was a big deal writing that book, may I say. And (lol) it's not over yet. Someday, certainly. (Or not, in the case of print versions.) But for now The End has been found. Thanks be to God indeed.