As of last Friday, the ENTIRE first season of The Nexus is out there in the world. Whew! I have to admit, I feel pretty accomplished.
I remember the days before I learned how to finish a novel. Or a novella, or a story, even. One day, as a teenager, I gathered up all the pages of my many, unfinished attempts. This was the ‘80s, so these weren’t computer files: these were handwritten pages in notebooks, on looseleaf paper, cute stationery, blank books, you name it. All different sizes and shapes. I think this was partly my love of stationery and office supplies, and partly an attempt to find the medium that would finally WORK.
What I discovered, going through all those unfinished stories and failed attempts, was interesting. Almost every single one of them ended at 32 pages. Different sized paper, different sized lines, so not all the same actual length, but almost every single attempt fizzled at 32 pages. None at all went longer than that. I’m sure there’s something in the numerology of it, but I’ve never really dug that deep.
I called it my Thirty-Two Page Curse.
I finally broke through the “curse” with my first attempt at an actual novel in the early ‘90s, something I haven’t published and might never publish, but it did spawn some characters you’ll eventually meet in Barrow City. I got well past 32 pages, but I still didn’t finish that book for over a decade.
Then, I found NaNo WriMo. And yeah, yeah, people talked a whole lot of bad shit about NaNo in recent years and it finally shut down, and I’m not even going into all that. The fact is, NaNo WriMo didn’t teach me how to write, but it absolutely, one hundred percent, taught me how to FINISH.
I remember hearing about NaNo for the first time in 2005. My best friend (who was also a writer at the time, though she’s since moved on to less agonizing ways to spend her time) and I went to a public writers’ group meeting at a Barnes & Noble. It was October, and a few of the people there who already knew one another, including the facilitator, were discussing whether they were going to do NaNo that year. They explained to us what it was and my reaction was you people are insane!
Because there was no way you could write an entire novel in 30 days. That’s batshit—right?
My friend and I absolutely did not attempt said batshit that November, but we didn’t forget about it. And after a few months of pondering, and Googling, and seeing what other people had to say, we decided to give it a whirl. We suckered a new writer-friend (this one is still a writer) into trying with us, and off we went!
I still had that half-finished novel sitting there, laughing at me. I considered, briefly, trying to finish that as my NaNo project, but I wanted to start fresh.
But not entirely fresh. Rather, I decided to revisit one of those old 32-page flops, one I’d started and dropped at least three times back in the day. I spent October making notes and outlining, and then started my book—yet again—on November 1st, 2006.
And… I finished it! I ended at something like 59,000 words. That was later expanded to around 65k and published a couple of years later. (It’s out of print now—just because a book is finished doesn’t mean it’s good lol!) The next year I planned ahead and took a week and a half off from work, and slammed out 80k in a month.
I did NaNo several more times but, honestly, it was never as big a deal as those first two. I eventually stopped doing it completely because, between changes to my job schedule and changes in my writing schedule, it wasn’t that helpful for me anymore. But it taught me several lessons I needed to learn about getting to the end of a writing project.
Oh, and my third NaNo, I finally did pick up the old novel and finish it. I spent fourteen years on the first half of that book: picking it up for a week or two once or twice a year, writing a chapter and revising it over and over before I moved on. I had just under 50k words in it, and it was only about half done. Then I started where I’d left off for NaNo WriMo and wrote another 35k, finishing the rest of the book in less than two weeks. I wound up making up the rest of my NaNo words that year doing short stories and the like.
Finishing The Nexus Season One: Unseen World is a new milestone for me. I learned to finish stories and books, and I’ve finished a lot of both since I learned that lesson. But finishing a SERIES? Wow. And yes, there are more seasons of The Nexus in the pipeline, but each season is, technically, a separate series, and I FINISHED ONE!
Crossing a new finish line has made me think about all the lines I crossed to get here. Writing can be a slog, especially for an indie writer with a day job sucking at their soul. But accomplishments like this one remind us of how much we’ve achieved, both now and in the past. I’ve come a long way from my teenage days of half-filled notebooks and stacks of 32 pages. I may not be a bestseller—sometimes it feels like I’m not a seller at all—but I’ve done all right.
So, here’s to the next finish line—and all the ones after that!
Thanks for reading!
