One false move and the space-time con­tinuum gets it

Word­count = 86,928

Good­ness, but aren’t things mov­ing fast?

I’ve always wanted to start a post with a line that could have fallen from the mouth of Jane Eyre.

No, really, I have. In fact, the writ­ing is pro­gress­ing with a most stun­ning alac­rity (I’ve moved on to Conan Doyle). The con­tents of the white­board, which the attent­ive reader will remem­ber was filled on Monday with everything required to move my char­ac­ters, themes and plot into pos­i­tion for the big, spec­tac­u­lar finale.

I inten­ded to spend a week or more writ­ing the skel­eton of these chapters, and then flesh them out over another week or so. As it hap­pens, they’re more or less done. Oh sure, there will be more to add, but my cun­ning plan of writ­ing them as five small chapters paid off, as whenever I got bored or frus­trated try­ing to think of the right words for one, I just flipped to another file and worked on that for a bit.

Although there’s always a down­side: in this case, writ­ing the plot out of order meant occa­sion­ally for­get­ting which bit came after which other bit, so I’ve also had to read the fin­ished product through from the start so I didn’t acci­dent­ally have time run­ning in reverse, which would annoy my char­ac­ters no end.

So tomor­row it’s back to the white­board once more, to clean off everything and start work on the actual, real cli­max, after five years’ work. Let’s hope I can hold the big texta steady.

In anti­cip­a­tion that the com­ing days may not make for the most breath­less blog­ging, I have done some research and dis­covered that almost every great novel in his­tory has been accom­pan­ied by a novelist’s blog. Over the com­ing weeks, in these pages, I shall endeav­our to obtain and re-publish some of the great novel blogs, begin­ning early next week. Stay tuned.