The Terror of Finishing a Big Project

Anneliese Fox
3 min readMay 11, 2022

It’s really a thing

Shelf full of ceramic bell bodies waiting to be completed.
The bell project work in process shelf. photo by author

I figure that I am 98.2% finished with my current big project: a middle-grade sci-fi novel. Three weeks ago, I guess that I was about 97.5% finished. At this rate, I might be done, when? Never?

Yup. That’s the problem. I’ve been working at this thing for three years, give or take, and I am gob-smacking terrified of being done with it.

Anneliese Fox

Writer of speculative fiction, programmer, artist in wood and clay, owner of Fox Computer Systems. My almost weekly blog follows what interests me at the moment