Welp, I’m dumb. I spent the time creating a photo for this post and didn’t bother to upload before publication time yyyeeeeeeeeaaaaah!

Anyway. I like my new update-every-two-weeks so far. It feels fresh now.

Life has been busy the last two weeks, from stray cats, to mortgage applications, to house hunting. The cats are fine, by the way. The pet hospital gave them to Humane Society, which found a foster home for the entire litter. They’ll be put up for adoption in a month or two.

Outlining the End

With 148,000 words on the page, I’m turning my attention towards the end of my novel. I spent one evening this week putting together a basic outline of the remaining POV sections in my book.

This is a critical process for a number of reasons:

1. I have to close out each POV character’s arc in a satisfying manner.
2. I have to ensure that each of my character arcs develops and rises appropriately to its climax and resolution.
3. My ending was the worst part of Manuscript: Alpha — I think by a pretty wide margin.

That’s right! I hate my alpha’s ending. It’s too short, it was rushed, and it did not satisfy a lot of themes present throughout the story.

I have made a lot of changes to the story in writing the beta draft, but it has always been a restructuring of the existing content, using my alpha draft as a template to overlay renovations and dressings.

But for my ending? I’m considering rewriting it from scratch.

That’s how little regard I have for my Manuscript: Alpha’s finale.

We’ll see when I get to that point. I really think I can finish this month, with mostly free weekends. But I’ll need to really grind and focus a lot more than I have been in recent weeks.

Goal for 6/23: 165,000 words, and shifting to The End

As I said above, I’m going to stick with Friday Write-Day posts every two weeks for now. These will be alternated with posts relevant to WoEM, but more substantive than word count updates.

Steve D