When will the book finish?

I've been reading, or rather rereading, about Vikram Seth for the last one hour. And as always, feel a lightness in my hand and an eagerness in my mind to write, to write as he does. The same cool, enjoyable style, the same wonderful word plays.

What inspired my latest search on him was his interview published two days back on a website. It accompanied an announcement of his sequel to 'A Suitable Boy.' In it, when the interviewer asked him if he would be able to complete the new novel in the stipulated four years when he had taken seven for ASB, he said that he was a more seasoned writer now. At the time he had begun working on ASB, he had never written so much as a short story! He had not known when he had started the work that it would grow to such gigantic proportions. It had just happened.

As I usually do, I drew parallels of this phase of his with my own life. Currently, I am working on my first book. That stage is long gone when I was skeptical about whether the book would happen at all or if I would lose steam mid-way and all my enthusiasm about being a writer would fizzle out. That has not happened. The book is going to happen. People have been asking me, when. I've been telling them, as I've been telling myself, soon.

On the first day of the year, I had set myself a target of Jan 31. Then, I put it forward by another month. Then another. And so on.

The work is still not complete though it is near to the end mark.

The thing is that this is my first book. I've had to battle with crippling perfectionism and concomitant with it, self-doubts. Also, the scope of the book has grown much wider than what I had envisaged. First the roots, and then, the Indo-European stream came in and fundamentally changed my book, for much better.

Now, as things stand, I ought to complete my book by the end of this month so that I can get on with the other ideas that are waiting in the pipeline. Let's see.