Ugghhhhh…

Man, I am sick.  It sucks.

I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel.  That sucks too.

When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project.  Is this really any go0d?  Is the story really holding out?  Things slow down a lot, and you lose most of the enthusiasm that carried you through the first half.  The daily drudgery of writing becomes harder and harder, and pretty soon you can’t see beyond the chapter you’re presently writing.  It’s not a whole lot of fun.

Then, as you get into the final stretch, the ending comes into sight and you start to regain a little bit of the enthusiasm.  Your goal isn’t too distant, and you start to see how things wrap up to bring you to that final climax and ending.  You find yourself believing in the story again, and excited to see it to the grand finale.

Of course, the actual writing gets harder and harder, exponentially, right up until the last page, but you’ve regained the motivation and you have at least a portion of the drive.

Right now, I’m kind of at the low point.  It doesn’t help that school is starting to get busier, too.  It certainly doesn’t help to be sick, even if it does give me more time around the house (man, I need to get out…I need to get out…).  But I’m almost at the end of the second act–one climactic battle, one huge and tragic development, one major try-fail cycle, and then I’m on the final stretch.  I’m currently at 64,250 words, so I should wrap up part two by about 68k and finish up the novel at around 100k.  Perhaps a little longer, but I don’t think part three is going to be much longer than part two.

One of the major doubts I have about this novel is that it’s too predictable.  All of my readers from English 318 have been making their predictions, and…really, most of them are correct.  In fact, they’re correctly predicting stuff that happens WAY later, stuff from part three that I haven’t written yet.  If this story doesn’t have any surprises, I worry that it might not be as good.

On the other hand, it has some ideas and concepts that are really drawing in my alpha readers, particularly with the Hameji.  Over and over again, that’s the comment I get–they want to find out more about the Hameji.  This is something that might help me to carry the book, even if it is a bit predictable: show this barbarian spacefaring culture at their most brutal, make them the key antagonists, and then slowly humanize them until the readers understand exactly why they do what they do, and even come to agree with them.  That is pretty fun.

So we’ll see how that goes.  In the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early–9:30 or 10:00.  This sickness is just killing me, and I don’t know of anything more effective at curing it than sleep.  G’night.