I’m coming down hill fast now on the first draft of Starforgers. Currently, I’m on chapter 25, at about 251 pages and 67,000 words in length. This novel has many subplots and events happening at the same time and I’ve spent the last two hundred pages building up plot that must now play out to an exciting conclusion.
It’s a bitter sweet time for a writer, writing the last third of a novel. You are by this time very familiar with your main characters and quite attached to their struggles. You know the end is coming, faster than you would like and you just want things to slow down so you can enjoy writing the story as much as you have up until this point.
But you know that slowing down now would be fatal. You have a deadline to make and readers are waiting patiently to experience the story. So you carry on, usually at a much faster pace than you have written up until this point. I expect to be writing nearly every day and in every spare moment during that day. Unlike before, now my family starts to realize that daddy is a writer. They begin to see me typing away in the corner, pausing only to tell them to turn down the TV or to wait until I finish this scene before talking to me. Luckily it only lasts a few weeks and the crunch time and the novel is finally over.
I hope to finish this bad boy by the end of this month, but realistically, it will extend a bit into June. So there you go, a peek into where I’ll be spending my time for the next few weeks. As a result of finishing this novel, I won’t be posting here as often as I would normally. I know all five of my loyal readers will be heartbroken, but try and carry on without me. ;-)