Writing Journal: Y2 Day 30

Well, I took a break.

Sort of.

Closing in on the end of the Cold as Ice manuscript, two things occurred to me; 1) there was no way in hell I could pull it together under 95,000 words and 2) my original plan for the end wasn’t going to work.

This caused me to stop my momentum and think.  Think about how I could rework the end I had in my head with the direction I have taken the manuscript in these last few weeks.  See, I’d actually written an outline for this novel, which is new for me.  The changes an agent brings.  Anyway, I had this outline and, for a bit, I stuck to it.  But I realized that the ending in that outline was easily 50,000 words and I was already at roughly 92,000 words.  A new ending had to be worked out.

Brent Weeks actually gave me some advice about the outline when I created it in the first place – You won’t be held to it!  I took that to heart this week.

So rather than push forward, I went back.  Back through the manuscript, fixing little things, adding a word here, changing another one there.  Found a couple of things I setup and never followed through on (marked those and fixed em this weekend).  Hit maybe 300 words Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights.

Saturday morning I got up and did my reading for writers group early, then sat down to write.  Didn’t know what, only that I needed to write something.

This is where random thoughts comes in handy.  I decided to do something completely different.

And it worked.

2200 words later (I forgot to screenshot my progress Saturday, so that’s Sunday’s count) and I’m well into the end, over my 95,000 word goal and feeling really good about it all.

The end is nigh.

~P