Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

So is trying to hit 3,000 words each day.  For the past week, I’ve been doing between 1,500 and 2,500 words every day, but lately it’s just been really hard.  I’m on break, and I know that I should have more time for this kind of stuff, but I don’t know.

It has been a while since I’ve worked on this story, and that might be a part of it.  I dropped it in the summer and just picked it up again a week ago.  That might have something to do with it.

I think it’s more than that, though, and I’m not sure what it is.  Instead of savoring the time that I have to write, I dread it and find myself putting it off and finding other things to do.  Most of my writing has been coming late at night, at the end of the day.  If I really was driven and enthusiastic about writing this novel, I think I’d be doing all my writing earlier on in the day.

Bah.  It’s like there’s some law of the universe that the closer you get to the end, the more you think it sucks and the less motivation you have to finish the damn thing.  At least, that’s the way it is for me.

But I will finish it before school starts up again.  That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish.  Even if it ends up being less than 50,000 words, which is quite possible.

Right now, I’m just over 35,000, and right on the cusp of the central climax of the story.  At least, that’s the way I’d originally envisioned it–the rest should mostly be winding things down.

The really interesting thing is that now that I’m banging my head against a wall with this story (Genesis Earth), the other one that I was struggling so much with before (Hero in Exile) doesn’t look nearly as bad.  I could almost pick it up and work on it again.  And the novel I finished last year–the one that I want to workshop in Sanderson’s English 318 class this year (The Phoenix of Nova Terra)?  When I wrote the last chapter, I felt like the book was pretty crappy.  Now, though, I can’t wait to work on it, I think it has so much potential!

It’s all so weird.  All I can hope for is that something publishable will come out of it all.