I realized I’m missing something: I have no ritual, no way of marking the occasion when I finish writing a novel. Since early 2018, I’ve completed six of them, and I’m a few pages away from I realized I’m missing something: I have no ritual, no way of marking the occasion when I finish writing a novel. Since early 2018, I’ve completed six of them, and I’m a few pages away from my seventh—which I will likely finish at work because it is so slow there—and the only thing I do when I’m finished writing one is flip the page and get started on the next one. I don’t go out partying with friends because I don’t have any friends to party with, I don’t treat myself to a nice dinner because I do that whenever I want (or never now that I’m broke), and I don’t pop open a bottle of champagne for obvious reasons. I don’t even give the book a once-over and prepare it for publication because a) I wait months before I reread something I’ve written, and b) it’s not getting published. (I love to write. I write not to be read, but for the act of writing itself.) I kind of wish I had something to do, though. I feel like writing an entire novel is something to be celebrated.