The Last Three Percent

I have declared myself done with the newspapers. I could work more, looking for small gleamings...here and there. Yet, when is enough, enough? I am pausing here to admit how scary it is moving from the intake of information to the assimilation of information. Later, I will have to put my assimilation of information into something coherent. Something that other people will want to read. That will be the most scary part of all of this. I think I hesitant because this step is the safest step. You cannot get wrong the information stage -- as long as you keep looking. I still have items outside of the Internet to research--that I have to travel to get to, but I meant, this part...the gathering of what I can find easily. The first 80 percent or so is easy. Like studying for a test in school, there is that learning curve. The first 60 percent is incredibly easy--stay awake in class. The next 10 percent -- do your homework. A little harder, granted but no bloody noses by doing that. To get into the eighties-- well an extra hour with the ol' textbook and maybe make a set of flashcards. Make them but not necessarily use them. But to make an A, up in the nineties, that takes work, real work. Several hours with the textbook, all homework done and understood, flashcards used until you get them right the first time. Hard work. Very hard work. That is where I am now--do I keep going and maybe work another month (or year) and find, maybe another article or two that I can use or say, time to move on. I could spend another year looking under every single rock and boulder and tin can, to really find everything...and I mean everything, but would that be a way of distancing myself from the real work? The writing of the biography? The work that others will see, and judge. Another year of research might make the book better or it might just provide another year of hiding out. Am I working for that A from a B or am I just avoiding the really tough work? And that finial moment of judgement.

I am going to move on, even knowing that I don't have every scrap of information yet. I still have to look into the divorce, and see if I can't track down the descendant of Mr. Dobbyns, Astor's secretary....The work is still messy, and fluid, and undefined. I just don't want to be one of those people who keep working on a project and never get done. Done is scary. Done is admitting that a work is the best you can do. But Done also means that you can move on to something else. Something else that could be even more profound than this one. More creative, more yourself, and reach even higher than the last. I would much rather be the author of 10 very good, finished, published books, then the almost author of one incredible but unfinished manuscript that is still a work in progress after 20 years. I have to finish so I can move on, even if there are a few more small strings I could track down. Even so.