More Chips from the Ice Cave

Chris Schaberg writes to me that he identifies with my last post on writing. He's just submitted his book on airports to Continuum (congratulations Chris!), yet he's left with a feeling that it's incomplete or flawed.

I've learned to trust this feeling as a symptom of having finished something. “Did I just send a bunch of unreadable crap to the press? Who in their right mind is going to find this original?” I start inventing comedy blurbs:

“I COULD put it down.”
A real MUSTN'T read.”
“An eye-closing account that made me never want to read the author again.”

Any long term project involves a degree of psychic intimacy and intensity that just doesn't feel right. And there is a real sense in which your book, precisely because it's finished and finite, doesn't address everything. Never mind. You'll just have to write another one...