Finished.

Just over an hour ago, I wrote the words “The End” — marking the end of my novel.

I finished it about two minutes before midnight. I could have finished it the previous night but I had been writing for a couple of hours and was very tired. To be honest, I wanted to savor these last couple of pages as I had been waiting to write them for a very long time.

So, I waited and wrote them tonight.

And then, it was finished.

It took me several years to write, but it seems that I always knew where I was going . . . I knew the ending and worked toward it.

Tonight, finally, I got there.

I don’t know the exactly date of when I first started, but I believe that this post was the first time I mentioned it here. There are other posts here and there that might provide little glimpses into my process as I went along.

It started as a short story, written for my children as a Christmas present. I gave up on it — at least, I gave up on it as a Christmas present — when I realized that it was too long to finish by Christmas, too scary to be a Christmas story, and most likely the third or fourth chapter in a much longer story.

Years later, it turns out that I was right. It is a strange story, I think — sad and funny and frightening and even a little grotesque and lovely all at the same time.

I’ve cried at what I’ve written. I’ve laughed a bit as well.

It has a strange shape to it but, I hope, a satisfying one.

I wrote it at night, mostly, sitting at a table. Sometimes I wrote in my car, at church, at my daughter’s ballet practice, sitting on my lunch break . . . wherever I had a free ten or fifteen minutes. Anything more than that was a luxury and a gift. I took them as they came.

I wrote it in longhand, in a series of notebooks. There are four of them in all, each about an inch thick. Three of them are secure in a safe place, wrapped in plastic and protected by alarm and fire systems. The fourth sits here on the table next to me. When I sleep, it will sit on my nightstand — as it has done every night since I started writing in it.

I wrote when I was happy. I wrote when I was overwhelmed. I wrote it broke, no money in the bank. I wrote when I was too sad to do anything else. I wrote in silence, late at night. I wrote when people were in the other room watching television. I wrote through tears. I wrote it with ghosts in the house. I wrote I wrote sober and I wrote tipsy and times in between. I wrote on my birthday and Christmas and most other days when I could manage it.

I wrote when I had no idea if it would ever be worth reading.

I am still not sure on that last one. But, regardless, I have written it. I have done something very few people are able or lucky enough to do: I have written a novel. And I am proud of that, at least.

I wrote it through a lot of difficult times. Since I started, I’ve been married, divorced, remarried . . . I still remained, thankfully and gratefully, a father through it all.

I started it for Sam and Julia. I wrote it with them in mind and, tonight, I finished it for them.

Tomorrow night I’ll take that first notebook out, open it up, and start trying to decipher my scrawls from over four years ago. That’ll be the second draft and I honestly don’t know how long it will take to get it past that point, to make it into the book I believe that it can be.

But that’s tomorrow. For tonight, I finished writing a novel and that’s a good thing.