Beautiful friend

Finally! Today I wrote "the end" at the bottom of the final script of the Winter book. The closing scenes have actually been planned for weeks in my customary first-draft form, ie on the back of envelopes and bank statements. But I managed to dream up a dozen other chores to put off the fateful moment.

When Poe wrote about the Imp of the Perverse, he meant simple procrastination:

"We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until tomorrow, and why? There is no answer… "

Actually, Edgar, my boy, there is an answer. Most procrastination occurs because, in the absence of a plan, our brains are overwhelmed with the number of possible routes forward and so nothing gets done. That's not what's been putting me off, though. I've been fiddling with sound effects and word balloons and historical research and checking continuity and writing RMS entries because I didn't want to say goodbye to Jack and Estelle and our other characters. Especially considering where I left them at the end of the book... Well, you'll see.

Of course, there's still a whole lot of work to be done. The script is just the start of it. Leo has almost 30 pages of pencils to go, and Nikos and Mike still have 50 pages of coloring. So we'll be immersed in the world of Mirabilis for a good month or two yet. But the end is in sight. So now we can start the really big task of actually getting this epic out into the world.