It seems I was perhaps a bit overly optimistic when I thought I’d finish this book this week. It’s easy to forget that more detailed, action-oriented scenes are a lot slower to write. I also had the issue that while I know what will happen, I’m not entirely clear on how it will happen, so there’s a lot of brainstorming before I can write each scene as I try to picture it and think of what, exactly will happen to bring about the plot points I already know about.

It’s funny how my mental images of these scenes have changed along the way. The scene I wrote yesterday ended up happening in an entirely different way than I originally planned, in a different place, with different people involved.

I’m also in the phase of “headlight writing,” where I can only see the scene immediately ahead of me, and I need to write it before I get a clear mental image of the next scene.

As a result, it may take me all week next week to write the rest of the book I thought I’d finish this week. It’s already longer than any other first draft I think I’ve ever written. It’s epic-style fantasy, so it can be a bit longer, but there may also be some cutting.

I like the way it’s shaping up, though. The things I’m coming up with now are definite improvements on my initial ideas, so it’s worth taking the time to think through it. This is normally when I get impatient and rush ahead, then have to drastically rewrite, so it’s good that I’m taking my time to try to get it right.

I do feel bad because I’m doing mean things to my hero now. He’ll end up better for it, in the long run, but he has to go through some stuff first.

I definitely have “book brain.” I was mentally planning the scene I needed to write this morning as I was falling asleep last night. Then in the middle of the night I woke in a panic because I’d forgotten to take into consideration the hero’s nephew Jonathan in my plans for the scene, and that was going to throw off all my plans. When I woke for real in the morning and thought about it, I remembered that there is no nephew Jonathan. The hero doesn’t have a nephew. The name “Jonathan” wouldn’t fit into this world. It’s important to the story that the hero is alone in this scene, facing the bad guys by himself. I suspect my brain was playing with something I did forget. I’d realized earlier in the evening that I had forgotten to take a certain element of how the magic works into consideration in my initial plans for the scene, and that’s why I was thinking about it as I fell asleep. I was figuring out how to work around it. I’d already had the “I forgot to consider this!” panic, and I guess it got incorporated into a dream. I have no idea where the nephew Jonathan came from, but now I think I absolutely have to have a character in some book have a nephew named Jonathan who’s present in a scene but not noticed by anyone.

And now back to not writing about Jonathan.

I’m so close to the end of this book. I could reach my target word count in a day’s work, but I won’t be at the end of the story then. This may be a somewhat longer book, but since it’s fantasy I figure that’s to be expected.

Normally when I’m at this point, I find myself impatiently rushing to the end because I’m so eager to get the book done, but I’m strangely reluctant to finish this one. I don’t really want it to be over with. I’m enjoying spending time with these characters. It’s like when you’re reading a book you don’t want to end, and you slow down to savor each page.

I suspect some of my current slowdown has to do with where I am in the book. I’m in the slight lull where they regroup before the final push, and I’m enjoying the characters having a moment to catch their breath and interact. The next thing I have to do involves shoving them out of a safe place and making them do difficult things, and I’m a little reluctant to do that, even as I’m also eager to see this part of the story play out.

No matter how much I drag my feet, I should finish this book next week. That means I’ll be in what I call Book Brain mode, when I don’t really want to think about anything else while I immerse myself in the book. I picked up some convenience food at the grocery store so I’ll have meals I can just reheat, and I might cook a few things this weekend so I’ll have leftovers. I took care of the serious errands this week, so I shouldn’t have to go anywhere until late in the week.

And then when I finish this draft I have some admin tasks to take care of, but then I’m going to give myself a little time off to relax and think. I need to start figuring out the next thing to write. I got a new idea I want to play with. It’s a long way from being ready to write, but I can start thinking about it.

One of the big topics in the writing world lately has been AI. There’s an AI program that supposedly can write as well as a human, given a prompt. And it’s already become a huge problem. Some science fiction magazines have had to close submissions because they were getting spammed with AI-written stories and couldn’t weed through all the submissions. Apparently, there are people who seem to think that selling short stories they don’t have to write is a get-rich-quick scheme. Give the AI some prompts, churn out a story in seconds, and then flood the publications with submissions, and something is sure to sell. It’s a quick and easy few hundred bucks made in minutes of work. Of course, that assumes that any of these stories sell, which they probably won’t, but there’s no loss to the submitter if they don’t, since they put no effort in. It’s the same principle as with spam e-mail. Might as well flood the world with it because it doesn’t cost anything more.

Except these AI submissions are pretty obvious and not that great, but the editors still have to go through all the submissions to find stories they might like. It’s hard to come up with a filter to screen out the spam that doesn’t discriminate against possible real authors who are just new and learning and don’t deserve a lifetime ban on submissions the way the people gaming the system do.

And, of course, there are already people “writing” novels with AI and publishing them on Amazon. A few minutes of work, then you’ve got a novel, and if it sells more than a few copies, you’ve still made a decent hourly wage. Even if most readers figure out it isn’t very good, it still increases the flood of books out there, making it harder to dig in and find the good ones.

I suspect that no matter how good AI gets at writing, AI-written fiction will never be that good because it comes down to the ideas. Just about any writer has had the experience of meeting someone who says they want to be a writer, but they don’t really want to write. What they have is a brilliant idea they want to share with a writer, have the writer write it, and they’ll split the profits. And I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a decent idea from these people. About 95 percent of them don’t actually have a story idea. They just think that their own lives are interesting enough to be a novel, so what they want is to write about themselves. I’m picturing all these AI-written books about boring men who’ve overcome some minor adversity.

What real writers know is that the idea is the easy part. Most of us come up with new ones every day. The trick is to figure out which of those ideas has what it takes to develop into a story and then to develop it so that it has enough substance to build a story around, and to do that, you have to write. Every time I’ve had an idea that feels totally complete, like I could just sit down and write the book, once I do start writing down everything I know about the story, I’m lucky if I get two pages. The idea is nothing without a lot of work. Feed that initial idea into a computer, and you’re not going to get any kind of decent result, especially since this is just a sophisticated auto-complete based on other people’s work. It merely guesses what word should come next based on all the input it’s received.

I think what a lot of the people using this tool want is to be published. They don’t really want to write. They just want a shortcut to the result.

Supposedly this tool does write good book descriptions, like what would go on the back of a paperback, but it can also be badly, hilariously wrong. I’ve seen one person describe it as more like having an enthusiastic intern who needs a lot of direction and supervision than like hiring a professional writer.

I’m still working on plotting the ending to this book I’m working on. I struggle with endings. When I start out, I have a detailed outline of the beginning, and the ending of the outline is a vague “they beat the bad guys and live happily ever after.” I tell myself I’ll figure it out as I get closer to it, once I have a better sense of my characters and the story. Then I get there and I still don’t know, so there’s a lot of handwaving and chaos.

But the ending is so important. It’s said that the first page of a book sells that book, and the last page sells the next book. That doesn’t mean it has to be a cliffhanger, just that it should be so satisfying that it makes the reader want to repeat the experience with the author’s next book, whether it’s another book in that series or an entirely new book.

So, I got the bright idea to figure out what that last page should look like. What will the characters be doing at the very end? What will the new configuration be? If the beginning of the book is the “before” picture of the main character and the world, what is the “after” picture once the characters (and maybe the world) have changed?

And I realized I had no idea. I had a vague sense of what the characters will be like at the end, but not what they’re doing or how I’d show what they’d be like.

This week, I’ve been working on that, outlining a potential ending scene and then reverse engineering from there. What kind of story climax do I need to get to that ending? What would lead to that story climax happening? And so forth. That’s made me realize I’ve made some poor choices in the beginning. There’s a whole sequence I can cut because it doesn’t support the character arc (and even undermines it). And that’s going to move the midpoint of the story, which also needs to be changed.

It’s been a good week for doing this kind of work because it’s cool and cloudy, so I’ve been huddling on the sofa under the electric blanket with tea and a notebook and letting my mind play.

I’ve reached the point in the book I’m working on where I need to figure out exactly how I’m going to end it. I know the final result, but how I get there and what the climactic scene looks like is kind of hazy. I was working on plotting it and struggling to put it all together when I got insight from an unlikely source: the trailer for season 3 of The Mandalorian.

It occurred to me that the story I’m writing is in some ways a lot like The Mandalorian. There’s a lot of “except for” and “but if instead” there, to the point that it’s not really like it at all, but the important thing for my purposes is that it centers on an isolated loner who takes responsibility for a vulnerable orphan. In all my outlines and character development, the fact that this guy is a loner is key, and his character arc is supposed to be him learning that he can’t go it alone and he’s stronger when he teams up with others.

And yet, very early in the story, when he gets stuck helping this young woman travel to a place that will be safe for her, his first thought is that she might be able to help him with the thing he needs to do. He then wants her to stick around. This is why it was so hard for me to plot the end. He completed his character growth arc in the first quarter of the book. That left me with no big turning point for the end.

Commence head banging on desk.

Oddly, I’d set up Chekhov’s entire arsenal to show that he was going to have a hard time working with someone else earlier in the book. We saw him have to take responsibility for someone else and immediately dump that individual with the first potential new home, which set up the way we expect him to act later. And then I forgot about it entirely. I did have some story reasons for taking the route I did, since there is some conflict and deception involved with him planning to get her to help but manipulating her into being the one to offer, but that’s not really what I want to do with this character. His character arc isn’t about him being manipulative. I’d have to change a lot more to set that up, and it would be a totally different story.

Fortunately, I know how to fix it, and it adds a lot more conflict along the way. Although this character is actually very little like the Mandalorian (not a bounty hunter who belongs to a strict warrior religion), I should put a picture of him on my desk to remind me that it’s supposed to take him some time to really warm up to this individual he feels responsible for, and even longer to figure out that this individual might have something to offer him instead of just being a burden. My Star Wars obsession seems to be good for my writing.

Now I’m going back and fixing the book so I can move forward in the right direction and maybe get a running start on writing the ending.

I woke this morning with the horrible realization that yesterday’s writing had been all wrong. I wrote a scene that was supposed to have been the big emotional turning point in which a key piece of information was revealed to one of the characters. It was supposed to be so shocking that it changed the way she saw one of the other characters and made her question her dealings with him. In a previous draft of this book, I’d tried to put this revelation too early in the story, but it was a dramatic scene in which the villain tried to force this revelation by creating a situation that made the character do something that he then had to explain, and then the other character had to react. But since I’d put it too early, they didn’t have enough of a relationship established for it to have that big of an impact.

Moving it much later in the story had a different effect. They’d built up some trust, but that meant I wrote it as just a conversation, and the reaction was simply, “Oh, that explains a lot.” No real emotional impact, no shock. No decision point. I’d completely skipped the turning point scene.

At least I did figure it out before I wrote any further, so I can fix it, and I’ve figured out how to fix it. I think the new version will be much better even than what I had originally planned because there’s more trust to have been broken. Since I realized this so quickly rather than on a later draft, I guess I haven’t entirely forgotten how to write. I think I was just being conflict averse. There’s so much conflict and tension in the world right now that I want these characters to like each other and get along. But fiction needs conflict. It’s hard to have a story where absolutely nothing bad happens. Even a book that’s being called the cozy fantasy has some bad stuff happening and some conflict.

So now I’m writing an angsty bit, and there will probably be a lot of chocolate consumed while I work on it. And I will need to put sticky notes around my desk saying “remember conflict.”

I should hit my target word count goal for the book I’ve been working on today, a week ahead of the deadline I set. Go, me!

However, since I’m revisiting a book I started writing last year, there’s a lot of junk left over from the previous attempt that’s still included in the word count. I’m still using bits and pieces of it in different places, so I haven’t moved it out of the manuscript file yet. When I do that, I’m sure I’ll lose at least 5,000 words.

And I’m nowhere near the end of the story. I may be a bit beyond the midpoint, but it’s hard to tell, especially with all that extra stuff around the beginning.

But I’m still going to take it as a win and celebrate as though I’ve reached a finish line when I hit that target today. And then I’ll reset the word count, delete the extraneous stuff that I know I won’t be using because I’ve long passed those parts of the story, and set a new word count and a new deadline for actually finishing the book.

That may happen after the holidays. I was planning to take a couple of weeks off after next Friday, but since I’m hitting the target early, I think I’m going to consider next week a light duty/admin period. If I have an idea for what to write and want to write, I may write some. Otherwise, I’ll catch up on promo stuff and admin stuff, watch some video lectures I’ve been stockpiling, and maybe actually do some Christmas decorating and shopping. And when I’m not doing that stuff, I may just read and relax. My brain is very tired. I think if I keep busy doing other things, it may figure out the rest of this story. Right now, I have a vague idea of what major things will happen, but I don’t yet have a clear picture of how it will look when it happens or what else needs to happen to get to those major events. It always comes to me just before I need to write it. And then I write it and then I realize what should have happened, and so I rewrite it.

But I’ve worked very hard this year, logging more writing hours than I’ve ever done before, and I haven’t taken a substantial break all year, so I’m not going to push myself for now. That’s what January is for.