There is No Antidote for Time

I had a draft of a post half-written, created some time back in 2020, updating on the previous year and how things had gone down. Needless to say, given that it’s now early 2024, things in my life did not go as planned, but I feel at least somewhat vindicated by the reason for everything going wildly off the rails.

I had to go back and read what the last published post had said, but I see that I did mention that my wife and I were expecting a child. Our daughter was born in May of 2019. We named her Savannah after the city that I’d fallen in love with. What we didn’t expect was for her to be born with a severe neuromuscular disorder that has yet to be diagnosed almost five years later. The doctors, having no predicate cases to draw from, estimated that she’d live a year. Two, at most. This May will be her fifth birthday, so she’s been beating the odds from day one.

I don’t want to get too deep into what life has been like over these last four years and change, but it has been difficult to say the absolute least. There is a unique and profound solitude inherent with having a child with a disease so rare that she may, in fact, be the first ever documented case of it. There is no body of research to reference, no prognoses to derive expectations from, and no community of other parents with children that have the same disease to lean on.

To say that this has derailed my grand plans to have the book finished by now is an understatement. I set out to finish the book in 2019, but that didn’t happen. I hoped to have it finished in 2020. I hoped that everything getting shut down by a global pandemic would give me sufficient opportunity to write. I earnestly hoped that I could finish it before October 2023, which marked ten years since I started writing it. None of those hopes came to fruition.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it. On the contrary, in fact. I’ve never been closer to finishing it. I saw in my previous post that I had said I was targeting 125,000 words. Well, it currently stands at 144,842. I’ve blown well past my expected word count, but it’s put me in a place where I have approximately 4 chapters left to write. Ten years of work and I’m finally nearing the completion of my first draft. I acknowledge that there’s still a long way to go. A first draft is just that, and there will be several revisions that will be needed to get it to the final draft. Editing. Beta readers. More editing. There are still several hurdles to cross.

And yet, being this close to the conclusion feels like finally reaching the summit I’ve been climbing for those long and tortuous years. I’m finally at the moment that I’ve been working toward, the climax of the story and defining moment for its main character. Part of me has this sense of not knowing what I’m going to do once I write that final sentence. But again, I realize the work will continue, but the most arduous portion of it, the ‘getting it all out on paper,’ will be behind me. And that’s not nothing.

That’s all I’ve got for now. After all of this, I’m still here, and I will finish what I started.

–J.