Originally Posted by
Dullahan
I want to be very clear about this, because periodically I do hear expressions of interest about MIAL, and those deserve a clear answer if nothing else.
Will MIAL be finished? This is not the right question to ask, because it presupposes things which are from the outset dubious. The question is not 'will' but 'can'. And here I will say that MIAL cannot be finished by me, because - to use an unlovable but necessary figure of speech - I am sufficiently removed from the person who wrote it that it could not feasibly be finished by me while still remaining MIAL.
I regret the way things turned out, because it was a lot of fun at the time. But that time was the better part of a decade ago, and I also have come to think that it was necessary that it ended (well, I should say simply 'stopped' or 'terminated') when it did. If I can venture a very general and unsupportable claim: writing is something learned only by doing it. 450,000 words of writing is, I would like to hope, an at least detectable amount of learning. But it turns out that all you learn from writing MIAL is -- how to write something that is not MIAL. The banana peel I slip on comes from the tree I planted. And there's nothing to be done about that.