At 82,000 words of my 90,000 target, I’m fast approaching the end of book3. My heroine is about to confront the source of her problems and deal with her definitively. And she’s going to save the day. Obviously. The knitting is nearly knitted. The pudding is nearly boiled. But it’s almost unbearable. I want to read the end of the story.
But there’s one snag.
I have to write it.
This is the moment to check my time-line grid, to bring in the clues I scattered earlier, to scoop up the floundering stubs of sub-plots. In this book, the last of a trilogy, I’ve been particularly rotten to my heroine; she’s lost a lot – her man, her grandmother and counsellor, the job she loved, her trust and her confidence. She’s been forced to admit she has to ask others for help, even those younger and with less experience. She’s has to get through some terrible stuff by herself and in patches of very shifting sand.
But her loyal friends have stood by her, she’s battled on, she’s persisted and learned a lot along the way.
Then I’ll take a day off.
It sounds mega exciting! I’m sure that you’ll really enjoy writing it – and we’ll all enjoy reading it.
Liz X
Thank you, Liz, for your faith in me.
This is, of course, the incredibly rubbishy first draft, but as soon as I’ve got to the end, I can start the scrutiny, dissection and rewrite that we politely herd together under the title of ‘editing’.