I’m recaping here something I wrote in my online writing group about writing ‘The Emerald Shower’s ending.

This has been a strange event for me this year and to explain it, I’ll have to rewind back to last NaNo.

I started last year a new novel which had been brewing in my mind for a few months. The writing went great – so great that I decided early on to do a double NaNo and go for the full hundred thousand words. I managed it, but discovered that writing 3.5K per day while being doable doesn’t leave me much time for anything else. Come December, I was so burned out that I decided to leave the book there for a few weeks. Then, something I hadn’t anticipated came. I got the opportunity to submit a partial to an editor in January on another work and discuss her input after that. So, I did what any author would do, I put the last project aside and went to full editing mode on the other. This editing before and after the editor’s input took me the better part of the year as I finished it in September.
I needed to go back to my NaNo project and finish it, but soon realised I didn’t remember much about it. I had to re-read it (a strange experience) in order to remember everything and find the book’s voice back.

Then came this November and I thought I could use NaNo to finish the book. At the time, it was at 100K in early act 3 and according to the acts 1 and 2 lengths, I figured I needed to write about 35k to wrap it. The only problem was, I only had in my mind a partial idea about that ending. The characters were all in very bad positions and it seemed like enough for me to find a good ending.

So I went to writing and produced a solid 5k in the first day. Things were looking good and characters started to converge on the final battlefield. Then, the villain did something unexpected : he decided to send all his minions that were hunted down by my hero to the 4 corners of the world in order to buy himself some time. I never expected this and since it was logical (and quite clever on his part), I had to go along. That single paragraph cost me about 20k, I’d say, launching the characters in a journey like those you find in early acts 2.

As a result, most of the writing for this ending feels like I’ve been writing the sequel in a series and not the end of book 1. After now 50k and a few more detours, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, though not in the way I would have figured. The main character was supposed to go into a bloodthirsty killing spree and be stopped by an alliance between her friends and the villain. Instead, I have a main character who accepted to surrender to the villain to escape destroying everything in her path and her son is doing all he can to turn her back into the bloodthirsty version of her, thinking it will save her. Very different endings and I think the second one is the stronger. I never even considered it until the characters moved in this direction. This is what I love about writing.

So to recap, I’m at 155K now, with an ending in view which should take me about 10k (ok, let’s be realistic here : maybe 15?).
I don’t advise anyone to put a book aside for 1 year as I did. There are multiple problems to solve when doing this : the character voices change, the plot gets fuzzy, and you waste words getting back into the book’s mood. I don’t know how Ray Bradbury did it all his life.

Another thing I learned is that doing 50k in a month is a breeze for me. 100k was hard, but 50k is barely more than what I would normally do. NaNo just helps me force myself to write 7 days a week instead of 4 with time to spare. I even found the time to attend a 4-day con (did the same last year, but found out I could barely attend the panels because I needed to write).

We’ll see what next year has in store. Probably something very different.