Where have I been? Down. This is a dark secret most writers know: reaching the end of a book is not a cause for celebrating, opening the champagne, smoking that once-a-year cigarette. It's a downer, the magnitude determined by how long you've been living with the book and how deeply you were involved in it. Yes, I finished ABSENT FRIENDS, my big dark out-of-series crime novel set in NY the months just after 9/11. In which I was deeply involved and on which I've been working for two years. Finished writing, finished the rewrites, based on my own rereading and my editor's notes. Sent it off to Bantam a few days ago. And immediately spiralled down. Three things happen when you're done. One is the same crash actors get when the show closes or athletes get when the big game is over, even if they win it, from the sudden let-up of pressure. The second thing is that the world you created and the characters who live there will go on but you can't go there anymore, except as a visitor like your readers. You don't belong now, you're shut out. The third thing is, you look at the book and realize this is really it, it'll never get any better than this. It's not that you can't see the good things in it, but all the time you're writing it and rewriting it there's a chance it may yet come up to the idealized vision in your mind of what this book can be. Then when you're finally totally done you have to face what the book is, and it's never that vision. I have musician friends who say the same thing about performances: while you're practicing and while you're performing there's the chance you may get it right, but once the performance is over you always, always know you didn't. Yes, I know this will pass; it always has. Yes, I have another project to work on. Yes, on the scale of problems this is a tiny one: no one cried, no one died. But it's a bummer, and it's where I've been.