9  Full Stop

After I showed Hedda the tool on her screen, 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, the way they had for months. Nobody noticed, including me.

The wall above my desk, where the chapters used to hang, stayed empty. The pin holes are still there, in pairs.

Red was still waiting for chapter twelve. Months after I sent him the README, he wrote to me about something else, and quoted line six hundred and twelve of it back to me. He had read it twice by then. That was the email where he asked a different question.

“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 this book 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.

I had built the tool for Full Stop, and now it had caught Full Stop’s own number and called it 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 checked every chapter against the list of 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 says its printing shop made the dash popular, and chapter nine still says the rival shop did, and the little notes at the bottom of their pages still point at each other. I’ve stopped minding.

The shoeboxes of index cards are in a closet. The card that fell 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 computer screen and asked how the book was.

“Which one?” I said.

She wrote that down.