Wordcount = 86,881

I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and realised that my final act is now seventy pages long, and I haven't even got to the really exciting bit yet.

This gave me an excuse to do something I've always enjoyed, which is editing in widescreen. Because there's a lot of material, and the changes I anticipated would most likely involve shuffling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a distance to let the large-scale structures reveal themselves.

Here then is what my living room floor looked like this morning:

The last act. Note large-scale structures revealing themselves.

Here's the same scene as observed by my editorial consultant:

The consultant's eye view.

Who insisted on offering his services. You'll find him in the next shot, helpfully commenting on the use of ellipsis in Chapter Thirty by licking his left shoulder:

All the traditional elements of the editorial craft are gathered here: manuscript, scissors, editorial consultant, up-turned fruit box.

An engaging few hours were spent scanning, shuffling and periodically climbing onto the top of the bookcase to chase imaginary mice, until it became painfully aware to me that all the effort I've put into cunningly interweaving my various plots into small, punchy chapters has turned the last act into a confusing mess. If you've ever succumbed to the tempatation to see what it would be like if you tried all three flavours from the Neapolitan ice-cream tub at once and found yourself ten minutes later frowning at a bowlful of unhappy grey sludge, you will have some sense of my disappointment.

It works much better, in fact, if I just tell one story, get through a nice big scoop of plot, then move onto the strawberry for a dozen pages or so.

That decided, my consultant and I moved on to small-scale structure, with the kind of result I really should have predicted:

My editorial consultant, having drooled on some unsatisfactorily crafted adverbs, inserts himself in a fruit box.

I collected my pages and discreetly retired to the computer.

Happily, I still like almost everything in the last act. With some re-stitching and a new beginning, which should take a week at the most, I'll be ready to start writing the actual finale, which may be only about 5,000 words or so (around 18-20 pages). Once I've written the whole thing through, there are some gaps which I've intentionally left further back which will be informed by the exact way I end the story. I'll fill those, and at that point will have a complete first draft.

I think that's likely to be about a month away. Maybe six weeks. Call me in August.