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...