Contemplating the Last Few Chapters

Over the last couple of weeks I have been contemplating the chapters leading up to the end of the book. I obviously know where the story has gotten to, and I also know how it will end. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what should be in between. I know the gist of what should be in there, but I'm just not sure of actually what should be said.

Sometimes, thinking through parts of of a book can take a while and what I should write will just come to me after letting my thoughts simmer. But, because I am close to being finished, I wanted to make good use of my simmering time. So, I made an editing pass through the thirty-four chapters that have been written while the simmering proceeded.

It had been quite a while since I had read the first chapters; I started writing this book about a year ago. In addition to fixing punctuation, correcting grammar, and smoothing out disjointed sentences, I was able to find a few inconsistencies, or forgotten facts, that were mentioned in one part of the book and then were not referenced in another part when they would be applicable. It's difficult to remember everything that you happened to mention in an chapter that you wrote close to a year ago.

I still have one mistake that I always make when I am writing, I just don't seem to be able to make myself incorporate the correction into my thought processes. An example of my problem is, 'The man that ate the frog was happy.' The correct sentence should be 'The man who ate the frog was happy.' I always use 'that' instead of 'who'. So, what I did during this editing pass was to perform a search for the word 'that' in every chapter and figure out if it should be 'who' instead. Often the corrections do not sound right to me, but I know that they (probably) are.

Just so you know, I will state that no one in my novel eats frogs (just in case you were wondering).

Getting Close

I've written a couple of more chapters since my last update and I've gone back and performed my initial edit on those chapters as well as all of the others that I had not done so on. The chapter that I made myself "slog" though was fairly long to begin with, but after I edited it, it turned out to be long enough to break into two chapters. There was also a subject change near the middle of the chapter that lent itself to being a good place to separate the text into the individual chapters.

I am getting very close to the end of the novel. Currently, I have completed thirty-four chapters and the word count is closing in on 82,000. It looks like this book will end up being about the same length as Infused. I've written part of the next chapter, and I know what the last chapter will say for the most part, so I just have to work out what goes between those two chapters. That shouldn't be too hard, right?