Did You Come This Far To Only Come This Far?

It’s often said we shouldn’t dwell in the past, that we need to let it go. Live in the now, focus on the future.

Well, I’m just going to put it out there: sometimes that rear-view mirror is the only way forward.

I may have mentioned this a time or two, but it took 6 years to get The Blue Iris into the world. A lesser-known fun fact is, I initially gave myself a deadline of one year to pull it off (or at least get a firm handle on when/whether I could).

A year felt like loads of time at the outset. By the end, a 420-page manuscript had flooded my consciousness, injected my veins with glitter–and needed a TON more work just to make it readable (never mind someday publishable).

So, what to do next? Time was up on my little experiment. Reality was calling (actually, it was my boss, from the tower on Bay Street, wanting an answer regarding my FTE).

I kept flashing back to an economics class I’d taken on the fallacy of sunk costs—the human tendency to keep pursuing a course of action that is no longer in our best interest because we’ve made an emotional and/or monetary investment in it. We don’t want our investment to have been a waste, so we keep investing (and thereby wasting) even more.  

I didn’t know if the manuscript was finished, if it made sense outside my head, if it was embarrassingly awful. Research told me there were many more steps in getting to publication, and odds were staggeringly in favour of failure.

On top of that, I already had a stable career—one that paid, and I was objectively qualified for. And it wasn’t going to wait much longer for me to finish playing around.

Setting the dream aside now was the rational thing to do.

And yet, sitting down to write a book is not a rational act to begin with. Reason had never been part of this conversation.

I wasn’t blind to the facts (or the fallacies), but the prospect of folding that manuscript into a drawer was, quite inconveniently, excruciating. Back-burnering those characters—people I built, then broke, and was only now figuring out how to put back together—was enough to set me privately sobbing.

Had it all really been for nothing? Was this transformative journey meant to just . . . end here? With this crappy beast of a first draft that had hold of my heart?

Or was it meant to end here, six months and thousands in editor’s fees later, with a much stronger draft light years closer to where, I now understood, it needed to be–and, as the editor clearly warned, infinitely harder to pitch as a result?

Or perhaps the logical stopping point was two years past that, having painstakingly cut 45 pages without deleting anything, rebuilt the opening another ten (twenty?) times, worked with two more editors (just to be sure), spent countless hours in publishing and query letter/synopsis webinars, followed by weeks and months researching agents?

Surely, it was time to throw in the towel a few more months later, after I’d pitched the book 50, 100, 150 times and got ZERO traction?

I was living that same fallacy I’d been so vigilant about (funded by the corporate pension I’d divested with a sour gulp). The more savings I spent and soul I sank into this quicksand dream, the more unbearable the idea of stopping. The harder it became to draw that line of “no more” and declare myself done having my butt handed to me.

New Year’s Eve came to represent yet another year where I’d failed to make it happen. Every hurdle I cleared only seemed to underscore that there were SO MANY still ahead.

All the while, one question would not let go: did you really come this far to only come this far?  

My favourite line from The Blue Iris. In hindsight, my mantra for the whole journey, constantly pushing me forward.

So as another year dawns, I’d like to say to my writer friends, fellow creatives, and anyone attempting their own much-too-big something that goes against all reason: you do not have to listen to all that talk, so loud around now, about leaving the past behind and looking to the future.

If the road ahead is a near-vertical climb, the destination fuzzy at best and the here-and-now finds you hopelessly tapped out, would you please turn the heck around instead?

Forget your (doubt-riddled? claustrophobia-inducing? soul-dragging?) goals for 2024, and look over your shoulder at “the goal.” Take stock—then, for the love of God, celebrate—every step you’ve already taken towards it. No matter what year it was. Even if it’s just that you STARTED; how many never do that?

It’s so easy to lose track of everything we’ve accomplished when there’s still so far to go. To fall into those rabbit-hole questions: am I wasting my time? Is this path headed anywhere? Am I on the wrong one altogether? But if you ask me, in any given moment, all those questions can be boiled down to one–the only one you need to answer:

Did you come this far to only come this far?