As you know (or at least you should, if you’ve been paying attention), back in February of this year, I completed a decade-long project:

What you probably don’t know, because I haven’t mentioned it as often, is that I have simultaneously been working on another decade-long project: The Patriarch Diaries.

The purpose was to give my grandchildren a chance to see what life was like, not only when I was a boy, but when my parents (and their parents, and their parents before them) were young. I didn’t think it would be such a mammoth task when I wrote the initial article back in April 2014. What I envisioned was a simple, disjointed memoir of my life and recollections, interspersed with forays into the more distant past.

This proved rather difficult so, to help me along—after years of struggling to make sense of the thing—I began a blog called The Patriarch Diaries in June 2020. This proved a good catalyst and helped move things along, if not quickly, then at least consistently.

When the dust finally settled on The Talisman series, I found myself with an impressive collection of blog posts, as well as a number of articles on my childhood and family history. Making sense of them proved an onerous task, involving a lot more time and writing than I originally envisioned. As the book grew, I began to realize that I could continue to work on it for the rest of my life and still not be done. So, at a certain point, I called time on it, which is the best you can do with a project like this.

The final version topped out at 400 pages. And these—due to the numerous photos that accompany the articles—are high quality, glossy pages, making the book a bit of a monster. It is A4 size (for you Americans, that’s about a foot tall and eight and a bit inches wide), an inch and a half thick, and weighs four pounds. Mailing them to my grandchildren is going to cost a fortune (on top of the cost for each book which, as you might imagine, is not cheap).

But cost is not an issue; it’s a labour of love, and I love the fact that it is finally over.

As of two weeks ago, for the first time in over a decade, I have no projects to work on. And I have a stunning book that I am quite chuffed over, even if no one else gives a toss.

All that remains is to shut down the Patriarch Diaries blog (I’ve said all I need to say on it, and if I did write another blog for it, I’d want to shoehorn it into the book), and start another novel.

One that, hopefully, will not take up the next ten years.