This Is Not "The End"

“You wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come.  Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it.  You never say, ‘that one is prettier.’  You just love them.”

Amado Vazquez speaking of raising rare orchids in Joan Didion’s The White Album

Finishing a novel feels much the same.  Except that unlike an orchid or an infant, you can edit a novel!  Thank God for that. 

Photo: Damon Tighe