Target wordcount: 75000, actual words 69000

Is it just me or was this more fun last time round? The final battle has started at last. That’s something. Not sure how long it’s going to go on. A while.

At this stage in writing a book, it usually feels like being on the home straight. I’m Red Five and I’m going in, and one way or the other there’s going to be a bang at the end. It’s not usually difficult to fly these last 20-30k words. This time…

See, a part of me knows I’ve got the right characters and I’ve got the right relationships between them and it does all come together in the right place at the right time, and everything that needs to be foreshadowed or at least mentioned before someone turned up and uses it has either been written in to one of the volumes or noted for inclusion (and there are several of those). The overall timeline is finally in order, the geography well enough set, the history finally all lined up. The next week of working on this isn’t going to change any of that, and now it feels like a wasted week. I want to go right back to the start of the first book and sweep through all of them and start putting all the details right. There are a couple of reasons for this – first it’s much much easier to do those rewrites, and secondly because I want to run from the start, now I finally finally can, and put it all together properly. Oh and also I want to submit some manuscripts.

However, I won’t be pandering to that urge. In part because it’s bad practice and poor discipline and the ending will always look like it had one rewrite fewer than everything else. But also because there’s always the chance that I’ll write the final page and some character will show clutching an antimatter bomb and it will be entirely right and proper and fit with absolute perfection into the narrative and the ending, and the only trouble will be that at no point ever in the three volumes up to that point has anyone ever mentioned that the viking-esque savages happened to also have an antimatter bomb.

So no, Stick it through right to the end with that first draft.