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?

Slogging Through

The last time that I had a chapter that I just didn't feel like writing, I didn't write at all for a couple of months. I knew what I wanted to say in the chapter, I just didn't feel the like writing it. It's not that the chapter was a bad chapter, it dealt with things that needed to be said and happen, but they were not directly related to the main plot. Of course, most novels have side stories and the main plot line can have effects that can widen out the breadth of the narrative, but that doesn't always mean that the author feels the urge to work on those sections as much as other sections.

Last night, I made myself finish up another chapter that I just didn't want to write. Normally when I write, I will sit down and write complete chapters at a time. But, when I don't really want to write for some reason, I'll end up writing just part of a chapter. Over the last week, I sat down four different days and was only able to get part of this chapter written each time. Once again, I knew most of the details before I even started the chapter. I had thought about a lot of the specifics of what would happen in this chapter a number of times over the past month or so. I knew what would be covered in this chapter before I made all of that progress on the book over the holidays. But, I just didn't want to write it down for some reason. However, I am pretty far along in the book and I want to try and finish up the initial draft relatively soon, so, I knew that I didn't want to waste a couple of more months due to a chapter not wanting to be written. Thus, I slogged my way through writing the chapter.

The new chapter ended up being longer than my average chapters, so I didn't scrimp on words, but when I read it to my best friend on the phone (as I have done with all of the chapters of this book), it just sounded awkward. Forcing myself to get through writing it resulted in text that did not flow like my writing normally does. I always smooth out edges as I go back and edit the chapters, but this chapter is going to take a lot more work when editing than normal to clear up all of the choppiness. But, don't worry, I will smooth it out. Just not right now. I'm sure that it will be easier coming back to clean it up after I've written a few chapters that don't have me looking for any excuse to step away from the keyboard.

Writing Once Again (Again)

I had not written anything for about the last two months. This was due to working on the lighting for a couple of plays, increased load at my day time job, not wanting to write the second half of a particular chapter, and I'm sure I can come up with some more excuses.

However, I have been getting back into writing mode over the holidays. I'm close to finishing up my fifth new chapter, and I still have a few more days off from my day job, so I am hoping to get more done. The sequel to Infused is close to 60,000 words long at this point.

Hopefully I can keep writing at a good rate after the new year begins. It would be nice to finish writing the book in the next couple of months. Of course, there's no telling how long editing it will take. That will be cleaning up the grammar and punctuation mostly, but still, that takes time.

Chapter Twenty

I've now finished writing through chapter twenty of the sequel to Infused. Chapter twenty is the longest chapter in the book (so far at least), but it is no where near as long as the very lengthy chapter seventeen from the first book. The word total for the first twenty chapters is very close to 50,000, and I am certain that it will be over 50,000 once I make my first editing pass on chapters seventeen through twenty.

The past few nights, as I have been trying to fall asleep, I've found myself thinking about a scene that is going to happen a few chapters after twenty. Before I was able to complete my writing of chapter twenty, I ended up having to type in a very rough version of the later chapter with all of the specific details that I kept thinking about so that I could get the thoughts out of my head and not stay awake thinking about them anymore. So, because of that, I have most of an additional chapter written, but I will have to go through it line by line and re-write them so that they are proper sentences and in the correct tense and style. I'll wait to do that re-writing until I have filled in the chapters that lead up to those events.

Sixteen Chapters

I've filled in the missing pieces and the sequel to Infused now has sixteen completed chapters. The word count is now up to around 37,400. I have also gone through my first edit pass of the new chapters. In my last post I stated that what I had written as chapter fifteen might be moved to chapter sixteen and that did occur.

With Infused, my favorite chapter was the fourth chapter. In that chapter, Geoff actually talked to a girl (which was a very rare experience for him up to that point in the story), and he lost himself as he looked at (and held) the girl's leg. To me, it just told volumes about Geoff, how he was isolated from companionship and how much he longed for it.

In the new book, chapter sixteen is my favorite. I won't say what happens in it, but it is a very exciting part of the story. I have been reading chapters to my best friend on the phone as I finish them and I was gratified when I heard her gasp while I read chapter sixteen to her.

Insomnia

Sometimes I will lay in bed thinking about how a chapter in my book should be written. This will happen night after night until I actually write it down (or type it in actually).

When I went to a a few seminars presented by local authors, they told the attendees that they should make themselves write every day (or just sit in front of the computer if they can't think of anything to write). But that method seems like it would make the process less enjoyable and also lead to writing inferior prose because you are more likely to force something out to feel that you are making progress. However, it is true that if I made myself actually attempt writing more that I would be further along in this book, but since I don't have people clamoring to read my next novel, I don't always have the motivation to work on the story. Still, when I start having problems getting to sleep because of thinking about how a part of the story should be written, I know that it is time to sit down and write.

There were a couple of times when I was writing Infused when the late night thinking caused me to write a few chapters out of order, and that is also the case with the sequel. In this case, it involves skipping parts of chapters to work on parts of the main story line that is interspersed with other story lines.

So, since my last update, I have completed chapters eleven, twelve, and fourteen. Chapter thirteen only has a few hundred words in it so far, and chapter fifteen is half written fully, and half written in notes of what it needs to say. Also, there is a chance that chapter fifteen may become chapter sixteen instead. We'll see.