Wolf

A few months ago, I finished the first 100k words of this novel. Since then, I’ve been moving very slowly forward. A lot of this was spent deepening the world, expanding and strengthening what was there, rewriting existing chapters, writing poems and songs to fill out the world still further.

And then there was all the nonsense happening with my dad, which severely impacted every aspect of my life.

Anyway, I was working towards the ending, sitting at about 130k words, expecting that I had 10k or more words to go.

But with this expected plan, I also was hurting the novel, I think. You see, at about 130k words into this novel, there’s a real and true climax. But then I was going to have an extended sequence that then led to the final image I had planned for this novel.

But those extra 10k+ words would make for a strange narrative shape, and not one I liked. When you’re 90% of the way through a novel and you come to a big action setpiece, it just feels wrong to then slow things all the way back down.

So I came up with an alternative, which was to bury those 10k through a little narrative and psychological trick in order for it to come out in a later novel. And then, after burying these memories, I jump to that planned ending image.

Anyway, I was sort of working myself up to give this a shot when I got an unexpected phone call from my good friend J David Osborne. I explained everything to him and he had the most obvious and best advice:

It sounds like you’re at the end of the novel now.

Thus and so, I realized that I am in fact done with this first novel! Which is a tremendous mental load off my mind and shoulders.

There’s still work to be done. I have to go through one final time to do some rewrites and add a few more scenes that are still missing and then clean up and beef up the ending as it is now, which feels a bit skeletal. I suspect I may end up hitting around 150k words for the novel anyway, but I feel I’m in a much more satisfying place.

Anyway, I’ve been putting off writing an update here because so many things are just odd in my life right now and this novel honestly feels like the least important thing at the moment.

But it is a relief to be finished. I’ll be hopping into something else soon, which I’ll probably share here as well. And there will be at least one more update about the rewrites of this novel.