That's really cool, and it makes me feel a lot better about the timeline that it takes to write a good book. I've been writing consistently for about 7 or 8 years now and I was beginning to think that I was an outlier. The fact that you spend that much time perfecting your story (I checked out your amazon link and perfecting seems like an accurate word choice) puts things in context.
Thanks, I'm glad I can help inspire someone. It's far from a perfect book, but I'm proud of it, and I would rather learn by polishing one project I really care about over years vs. spending seven years writing seven novels and trunking them. At least this way, you end up with something you can publish by the end.
You have to really love your story though. I could probably recite that thing word for word at this point.