It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Some wonderful things have taken 10 years to make.
In next five to 10 years I probably would have done my best work, but I was afraid of having another 10 or 15 years ahead of me and feeling stale, so this was an opportunity to reinvigorate myself.
So if you see Ten Years After, it's not me anymore. I'm very happy with what I am doing now.
It's amazing, it doesn't feel like it has been 10 years since retirement.
I prefer to remember the happy things over 10 years, the things that went well. Let me see, what did go well?
I'm asked all the time, 'Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?' And the answer to that is, 'No.' It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination.
I'll talk about these things, but it's just, you know, you only get so much time and I'm much more interested in what I'm going to be doing next year than in something I did 10 years ago.
You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.
Instead of looking at the past, I put myself ahead twenty years and try to look at what I need to do now in order to get there then.
If you think you know where you're going to be 10 years from now, that's where you're at now. You're just putting it off.