As the “99%” on the progress bar above indicates, there is still a tiny teeny bit of work left before I can call Tonoharu: Part Three unequivocally, 100% complete. I should be able to complete what remains over the course of an afternoon. The only reason I haven’t done so already is because it involves details I need from my book printer, and I won’t have that information until right before I go to press.

But basically, Tonoharu: Part Three (and by extension, the entire Tonoharu story) is now DONE.

As you might imagine, reaching this milestone has put me in a contemplative mood.

I can’t remember exactly when I started Tonoharu (which is telling in and of itself), but I believe it was late 2003. This means I’ve been working on it for like TWELVE YEARS. I took breaks here and there due to illness, injury, and burnout, but those breaks were few and far between. Even accounting for those hiatuses, I think it’d be conservative to estimate that I put a good decade of almost daily work into Tonoharu.

So after all that, how does it feel to be done with it? In a word, weird.

It’d be like if someone came up to you and said, “Okay, you’ve been brushing your teeth for years and years now… congratulations! You have now completed the task of toothbrushing. You don’t have to do it anymore.”

Brushing your teeth is just something you do everyday, forever. It’s not a task that you complete. I’ve been working on Tonoharu for so long, it’s started to feel like that. A part of the daily routine. To think that I’ve completed this thing that I’ve devoted more than half of my adult life to is hard to wrap my brain around.

As such, I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll write a more detailed postmortem about Tonoharu in a few months, after I have a bit more perspective.

But for now, I’ll reaffirm that we’re still totally on track to meet the previously announced October 2016 release date for Tonoharu: Part Three. (I wrote about why I set the release date so far out in this blog entry, if you’re curious.)

With the release of the book now less than a year away, I’m hoping to start ramping up my marketing efforts again. So expect more frequent* blog updates in the future as well.

*(Admittedly, it’d be hard to update less frequently, but…)