9  Full Stop

After the demo I didn’t decide to stop working on Full Stop. I didn’t decide anything. I just didn’t open it the next evening, or the one after.

The evenings went to the tool, as they had for months. Nobody noticed, including me.

The wall above my desk stayed empty. The pin holes are still there, in pairs.

The email in which Red quoted line six hundred and twelve back to me was the one where he asked a different question. He had read the README twice by then.

“Is there a book in here?”

He meant the tool, and the three years, and me.

I said I didn’t know. Then I started this one, which is how I found out.

The first night, I ran the tool on it, the way I had run it on Full Stop a thousand times. There wasn’t much of it yet.

It found one problem.

It printed the sentence, with the chapter and the line, the way it always did. This book said “eleven chapters”. This book has nine.

The tool, which I had built for Full Stop, had flagged Full Stop’s own number as a mistake.

I looked at it for a while. Then I wrote the tool a note telling it that the count belonged to another book. It took one line.

It was the first time I had told the tool anything about Full Stop that wasn’t a complaint.

I ran it again. Nothing.

This book was written with the tool. Every night it read every chapter against what the book had promised, and told me when one disagreed. It told me several times. I fixed most of them.

A tool built to avoid a book can still be how a book gets finished. It just isn’t the book it was built for.

Full Stop has eleven chapters. It still does. Chapter four still credits its shop, and chapter nine still credits the rival, and the footnotes still point at each other. I’ve stopped minding.

The shoeboxes are in a closet. The card from behind the radiator is in one of them. I’m still not sure where.

Last week, in the last four minutes, Hedda turned her chair away from her monitor and asked how the book was.

“Which one?” I said.

She wrote that down.