As I finished my chapter early tonight (23rd, yeah!), I started to review my outline and plan for the end of the act.

I estimate I have something like 3 chapters to go before the act is over. I could add one more if needed, but I don’t believe that more than one should be necessary. I have some nice things to do in that act’s ending and I’m looking forward to that.

That’s on that thought that my eyes fell on the ending of the plot : the big ending of the book (still one act away then). One phrase especially sprang to my face. I won’t say what that phrase says yet, but immediately my mind found a tiny nag. Just a tiny thing, really.

Let’s imagine that my ending is something like a plane crashing (it’s not, really, I’m just trying to get you to understand my problem). Great ending, lots of fireworks. The thing is, at some point of the story, I had someone board the plane. That was necessary at the time and works well up until now. Imagine then my eyes glossing over the words “plane crashes” (I hope I didn’t just trigger an Echelon process with those two words). You might say great, fireworks, nice ending, but what my mind just realized was that “hey, there’s still someone in the plane!”. I don’t want that character to die, I had just forgotten where it was.

Maybe it was that last chapter I wrote (something like the character spending the whole chapter looking through the plane’s windows) – after having written that, I have a keen understanding that this character is inside the plane.

I have now a big problem : I have to justify that the character has a parachute now and can exit the plane just before it crashes. I hope that the reader buys it, right now, I have no idea how to do that.

The good point is that as I hadn’t thought about an ending thread for that character, now he’s going to get one, otherwise… crash. Really, I want that character to come out of this story well, as I like him – I don’t want to break that promise – this character has to be all right at the end (On a personal side, if anything bad happens to that character, I’ll never hear the end of it!).

Am I glad I detected this early…