Wordcount target: 59000. Actual words 57000.

I have completely lost sight of whether what I’m writing is any good or whether it’s rubbish. There are now half a dozen tweeks and twiddles that need to be engineered back into various scenes in the first half of the book, some of which I continue to forget when I should be remembering them and others are now being written in as though they were there all along. The result is what we, in the writing world refer to through our uniquely obscure jargon as A Write Mess(TM).

At this point I’m into the last half of the story and since that;s also the last sixth of the trilogy, the pace will be ramping up and the action will be building all the way to an end in which all the threads will spectacularly come together in a grande finale that is as inevitable as it is rewarding, or else they won’t. And in writing that section of this first draft, I will completely forget the rambling nonsense or insightful and swift yet precise character portraits of the first half. And by the end, I will have just as little idea as I do now as to whether what I’ve done is any good and will have completely forgotten all the fiddles that need to be done until I start the rewrite and look at the notes I’ve left for myself[1]

To some extent this happens every time. With the last one, it felt distinctly uneven throughout the first half too, and then settled later, and with the first half recast into that shape, it worked. At least, I think it did. The rewrite seemed easy enough anyway.

So I cross my fingers and my toes and prepare to send all my small attack craft on their final all-or-nothing mission to destroy the death star and come back covered in glory, and all the while, it’s never quite certain that Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon are actually in the story at all…

Nine days left. This isn’t going to be finished in a month this time.

[1] Things like A is going to have sex with B later. So they should act like they might at least secretly be interested in each other. Which I then forget in once scene, remember in another, and then forget again afterwards and it’s all like it never happened except for two chapters somewhere in the middle. Or the whole bit about the stuff that one group of characters are supposed to be carrying around with them that I keep forgetting they have. Sort of like the Wages of Fear where they not only keep forgetting that the nitro is there but it really does keep vanishing .