I may have been wrong about love scenes being the hardest for me to write. I’m getting (dear God spare us all) somewhat better at writing them (or at least I don’t require as much brain power to do them). I had to write two more for Twilight of Lanar’ya (one near the very end of the book) and they were, all told, fairly painless.
It’s the last paragraph of a book that’s a bitch to write, I think. I knew what the last sentence would be. As a matter of fact, I wrote the last sentence before I wrote the first sentence (this makes sense, I promise!). But that last paragraph…packing all the reactions into one paragraph…and then rounding out the action but leaving enough of a teaser to make a good segue into the next book?
That’s difficult. I don’t usually have this issue with Alayne’s Story because each part there is kind of a discrete thing. Part I will stand on its own. Part II doesn’t require Part III to complete it (but you’d best read Part I first or you’ll be hopelessly lost). Part III doesn’t require you to delve into Part IV and Part IV isn’t going to be dependent on there being a Part V.
So, why is the progress bar not at 100% if I’m finished with the last scene? Because I’m currently doing the first editorial pass where I go back, fix inconsistencies (I had a couple of “oops” name-spelling-changes to correct), make sure that my foreshadowing devices show up when I want them to, correct a few back-dates and references, and add in some descriptive text in places where I wasn’t quite certain exactly how a setting would be laid out when I wrote the scene (again, this makes sense, I promise!). I estimate that I have another 10k words to add to the novel before it’s done and ready for an agent to read.
Once I get it sent out, I’ll start working on Book 2 of this series (it’ll be a trilogy of three books versus to current fad of trilogies of indeterminate numbers of books). Book 2, I’m hoping, will take me only two months to write but Book 3 is going to be a bitch to do well. I’m hoping that I’ll have laid my trails well enough by the time I get to book 3 that it won’t be as difficult as I fear but the fact that there’s going to be about a twenty-year time lapse between the end of 2 and beginning of 3 is going to mean I’ll have to re-map events almost as if I’m doing a stand-alone book.
Well, enough of my moaning. Time to go get cracking on the editorial pass so I can get this damned thing done already!
