jumping around

In the last several books I’ve written, I’ve noticed a tendency that as I approach the end, I leap ahead, write the end, then come back and fill bits in.

I have been doing that for this whole bloody book.

Now, I know people who work this way as a matter of course, but I don’t, and I don’t like it, and seriously, what’s that all about anyway?

This evening I realized that it’s because I’m writing the end. I mean, yes, the end happens to be 100,000 words long, but when you’ve got a million or so words preceding that, basically, the last hundred grand is just flat out The End.

I don’t like it, but at least it makes sense to me now, and helps explain part of the difficulty I’m having writing the wretched book.

The value of ‘difficulty’ should, of course, be remembered as “approximately 40K in the last week,” which may just go to show how skewed my standards are. But nobody ever accused me of holding myself to reasonable standards.