Updating on Kestrel Soars, now with numbers

Endings are hard. They're emotional, they're supposed to wrap up all the loose ends, and they're the last thing you can say about a particular adventure. Sometimes, they're even the last thing you can say about particular characters, ever.

For a very long time, endings have been my weakest point of fiction. I don't like to end things. I don't want things to be over. I don't want these characters that I've spent so long grooming and building to disappear like smoke in a breeze just because one particular plot is done.


Endings are hard. People bitch about them, people fetishize and eulogize them. Sometimes I think people care more about how something ends than how it begins or how it carries along.

So what did I do? I wrote an ending. A 22-page nearly 6,000 word climax and resolution technically. It's not finalized, so few things are ever finalized, but it's there, and it's not some abstract floating in my head, not something that I'll get to any day now...it's actually done. And I'm proud, hell yes I'm proud of myself. I have whole drawers and cabinets of things that don't really end, they just sort of fizzle out or stop short.

If I can write one ending, I can do another. I know I can.

I said in my previous post that I don't often track pages and words, and I don't really like to -- the structure of things so often annoys me, as if I'm supposed to care more that it's precisely some number of pages and exactly some magic and specific number of words in order to be good.

So my stats thus far, counting the ending bits I wrote yesterday --- 48,949 words which is about 196 pages (250 words to a page, remember).

Do some quick math. (97,000 - 48,949 = 48,051 words left) I'm about half way.

The reason I don't like all the math involved is that when I say I'm halfway based on word count, I immediately look up at the page count, and double it -- (196 * 2 = 392, which seems LONG).

And checking my calendar, given that I've chopped down from 3 stories to one novel, I'm still a month (31 days exactly) ahead of schedule.

Let's make some bullet points:

• I will skeleton the rest of the book (that means, go through the draft and write some notes in braces [ ] as to what goes where)
• I will put together a draft set up with better formatting (kill the header/footer, tweak the margins etc) just to see how the layout's coming.
• The momentary weather has thrown a wrench in my plans, so my immediate building research is out, but I will work on the dialogue a bit, especially those attributions.

Sounds like a good plan.