When Alana tagged me to participate in Speak Out With Your Geek Out, I loved the concept but didn’t know where to start.  I have a ton of geeky habits.  Obviously, I write science fiction and fantasy.  I play Magic: the Gathering, and I pretend to play Go and Bridge.  I fence – pretty geeky as Olympic sports go.  I ran a three-year-long Star Wars campaign in college using the West End Games d6 rules set, which was totally awesome.  I game with my friends on the weekends.  I own a kilt, and three swords.  I just downloaded Civilization V, and I love playing it with a tablet & stylus because with a stroke of a pen, I can send my armies marching across the surface of the world!  For Persia!

But I’m not the most dedicated Magic player in our group.  I’m rarely the one to discover new board games, or TV shows.  My video game playing pace borders on the glacial, and my knowledge of Bridge, Chess, and Go hovers just above “how does little horsey move?”  I read, and I read widely, but so do most people I know.

Writing’s probably the thing I’m the biggest geek about, but while I can gush about the act of creation and the joy of holding a pen and the pleasant rush that comes when someone says to you, “That’s really good,” I can’t write that essay at less than book-length.

So here’s my exhortation, the thing that I love and that all of you should try:

Finish your work.

Opening your laptop and starting a story about aliens, or the devil, or aliens meeting the devil, or a murder, or vampires, or whatever – easy to do.  Starting a role-playing campaign with your friends – straightforward.  Forming a band – all you need is a name (or ten).

Once you’ve started, though, follow through.  For writers, that means finishing the manuscript.  Love what you’re doing.  Don’t doubt.  (Doubt comes later – that’s your Inner Editor’s job.)  GM’ing a campaign?  Don’t leave it a sequence of unconnected episodes, with a hidden mastermind behind every plot.  Add tension, complexity, import to the story.  Climax.  Reveal what’s been kept secret.  Slide the players into a quiet denouement.  Bandmates – record that album.  Write those twenty songs.  Play some shows.

You can’t finish everything.  You will abandon projects.  (Don’t give them up entirely – an abandoned work is only a work you haven’t returned to yet, or a work you haven’t figured out how to subsume into something else.)  But you will mark your life by the projects you completed.

Finishing requires effort.  Requires expansive mind.  Requires the courage to reject older ideas, to delete formative scenes, to realize that maybe you should learn to fingerpick, or keep time, or play a diminished chord.  Finishing requires attention to detail, sensitivity to your own goals and motivations, and a blind obliviousness to everything in the world that says you should do something else.  Or, if not obliviousness, then at least the knowledge that everyone would understand if you quit, that it would be cool and give you more time to sleep or hang out with your friends – and the determination not to quit anyway.

Finishing, in short, is the geekiest, coolest thing I know.

And it can make your life better.  Writing “The End” at six in the morning after a twelve-hour typing binge in my junior year of high school, on a 300,000 word novel I’d started a year before, made me think differently about the way I wrote, and the effect it could have on me and on other people.  I started off writing a story about angels and demons and the apocalypse and superheroes, and ended up… still there, but better.

All of you out there with a half-finished novel in the trunk, or a painting not done, or a few songs you’ve never played in front of anyone: try finishing your work.  You’ll feel awesome, and I guarantee you there are people who’d like to read/see/hear it.

Edit before you show it to them, though.  That’s important, too.