The Grandest of Revolutions
I have been working on The Grand Revolution of Lakeside since 2015. After finishing my first book in just over four months, I felt confident about the prospect of tackling my first novel. And while I wasn’t surprised when it became evident that Lakeside was going to take a bit longer than four months, I never envisioned it taking seven years.
I wish that I could report that such a drastic increase in time correlated with a romanticized pouring over of every detail amidst a grinding towards perfection. Unfortunately, it was an ebb and flow of concerted effort and fearful, depressive avoidance. Periods that were defined by love and confidence for my story were intertwined with periods of frustration and general disdain for my efforts. Even now, as I stand at the precipice of completion (and publication), those waffling periods of varying emotions continue to flare as intensely as they ever have.
With time comes manufactured pressure, mostly of the internal variety. What does it mean if all of my efforts are for naught? What if these 51,000 words are boring, or pointless, or just bad writing? Where do I go creatively, or as an individual, when nineteen people read the book, and my life is exactly the same as it was before I published this apparently critical endeavor? The questions pile up. And, thus, the doubts do as well.
As I complete the final edit of this book, I have begun to understand the value in finally letting it go. Internal debates over self-publication versus represented publication rage on, but I have come to a resting place where this text has developed for so long that I no longer have the patience (or see the value) to put it through an editorial bloodbath on the recommendation of another, thereby delaying possible publication by months, if not years. It’s time to publish my first novel.
Part of this journey has been coming to terms with the realization that I can just keep writing. That Lakeside can be whatever it is going to be, whether that be masterpiece, failure, or something in between. To approach the writing of a book like a child coloring a picture: If I screw this one up, I’ll just make another. So, it’s onto the next book, and The Grand Revolution of Lakeside, sans all the pressure I have placed on top of it, can be what it was always meant to be: A chapter in my creative life, dreamed of and written for no other reason than because I wanted to tell stories.
Don’t let these words temper the excitement that I feel to share this work with the world. Buried in all my feelings of inadequacy is the acceptance that I gave this book my best shot. At this point in my life, this is the best book I could have written, while also being reasonably close to the book I wanted it to be. And if I’m being honest, I hope this is the worst book I’ll ever write. I hope that in twenty years (and many books later) I can look back on Lakeside and say that I only got better from there. But until that time comes, I believe in Lakeside. I believe in the hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of deleted words and edits that I have endured to give this book to the world.
I hope that world loves it. But if it doesn’t, I choose to love Lakeside anyway.