I reached it.

I am amazed.

Stories I have in plenty; endings are one thing I have a dearth of.

Two next-steps:

First, updating the added strands of story so they all are current with this version.

Second, I have the notes I made as I went along, like, this event needs to be grounded in an earlier hint, and, she can’t be standing on the left and be doing that on the right.

I’ve got nearly 50 pages of notes, and while I know they aren’t all changes I need to make (most is just a dated list of how much work was done each session) I still get a bit psyched out if I let myself think beyond just a page or two at a time.

Spring is not near by any stretch, but here in the North we have reached a different milestone: being able again to open the drapes when we watch Daddy leave for work, and leave them open.

The light is back!

This makes early rising much more natural and achievable.  I’ve spent the last couple days adjusting my internal clock, and I’m all ready to go.  Woo Hoo!  (Of course, I say that here to twist my own arm a bit to do it.)

I met a gal last week who said growing up in Alaska she gained 15 pounds every winter and lost it every spring.

Winter changes your life.  And so does summer.

So I’ve been up early the last several days and have been picking at that last chapter (it’s turned into a total re-write, so it’s a bit slow-going).

I’m reinspired just now, though, because in a pure, words-per-minute way, morning writing is decidedly more productive than evening writing.  For now I can still see how much is being accomplished in terms of word count.

I think it’s the natural sense of urgency that I can only write until the day “starts” at 7a.m.

At night it’s a lot easier (or perhaps I should say “more natural”) to dawdle and stare off into space.

I’m not implying these have no value, but not all of them are productive (even sideways) and they certainly don’t get the story written down.  Every writer needs both kinds of work.

At night, when the fire of creativity is lit, it’s much easier to ignore the tugging and begging of one’s body complaining it’s tired than it is in the morning to ignore a similar tugging of little hands and voices.

Knowing that that is coming– hearing the restlessness in the next room as little eyes watch the clock waiting for that long-anticipated 7:00— has the effect of hurrying me along.  I agonize less over adjectives and race instead to know what happens next?

~ ~ ~

The challenge just now is balancing my theme of teamwork against the need to stay focused on the main character.  The first version of this ending was a mass of names and bodies throwing themselves at the problem, and the importance of Linnea and her contribution in bringing the fight to this (manageable) point was lost in the surge.

On one level you could say I don’t trust Linnea (my main character).

~

She’s not all that charismatic or attention-gathering by her personality or wit, and there have been times when I’ve feared she’ll be overshadowed by her companions, so I feel very strongly she needs to be as distinctive as possible at the end.

So this morning I think I found a way to do what I want to do, and I’m just itching to play with it (but I can’t just now ’cause my brain won’t work that way when I’m juggling kids).  So that’ll either wait till an early bedtime or tomorrow morning.

I should mention, because it might be of interest, that this teamwork vs. the individual dichotomy became most clear while watching Disney’s Dinosaur with my kids Sunday.  That’s a show that tries to be all about teamwork, but it still comes down to the one in the end.

~

Made me think about my goals and how they looked in another story.

Just one scene to finish till I’ve reached “The End” and can start working backwards to make all the details match.

Wow.

I can’t believe this is real.

As in, moving quickly.

I put up more than 2,000 words in the last two days.  Which is really good for me.

Actually the whole of it is one scene– the first wholly new scene I’ve written from scratch since… I can’t remember when (rewriting the one I’d already written didn’t count– I knew where it needed to start and end).

One very. rough. scene.  But it sort of fixes the problem of #1 in my 7 Quick Takes for the novel, so I’ve got one more thing off my immediate to-do list.

By the time I cycle back around to it I should be able to iron out the really lumpy parts and just keep the useful stuff.

I only have three scenes left people—three!— and everything I wrote that month, long, long ago, will have been chewed through at least once.  Everything in this document will be brought into alignment with the final storyline.

I wish now I’d kept track of how much of that month I wrote one-handed, nursing a 6-month-old all hours of the day and night.

And people asked me how I could get so much written when I had a little baby…

Added ~ 2500 words in the last week.  It took that much to update the last of my (p)reworked scenes.

One of the noveling books I’ve read (probably more than one) emphasized that each character should be multi-purpose.  The doorman should never be just open the door.  He should also be the one who holds some essential clue.

~

I recently made a connection that catapulted a minor character of this novel into a major character in the next, swishing motivations and appearances all over the map.  So I went back (hand-slap if you have too) and brought the cleaned up portions up to date.

I must say, it was amazing how much faster the clean chapters were to update than they were to clean up in the first place.  Wow.

Anyway, the first 17 scenes are now current with my “3.4” version of the plot.  One particular advantage of flying through these scenes was feeling the overall tone of the piece and knowing (*quite* clearly) which chapters were out of sync.

Two out of 17 doesn’t seem so threatening; and noticing those two indicates that I actually have some measure of cohesion in the rest of it.  Very encouraging.