What I should say, but never think of at the time, is this: it’s hard work. Raising children is hard work. Balancing any kind of paid work with raising children is bloody hard work. I’ve learned a lot about my writing over the last five years since my first child was born. I’ve learned not to be precious about how and where I write. I’ve learned how to get it done, one achievable goal at a time. I’ve made it to a really important rung on the ladder – selling books to publishers – and am working very hard on the next one – writing books to deadline.

As Maggie says, having children isn’t an excuse not to write. I’d like to add that it can be, however, a very valid reason, whether you’re talking about five years or two weeks. This is particularly pertinent to me because the school holidays started today.

Some of you have heard this song before! I seem to talk more about not-writing than writing these days. One of the things I’ve learned particularly in the last year when I have been writing to someone else’s schedule rather than purely my own is that one of the essential things I need in order to be a productive writer is scheduled time off. It’s good advice for any freelancer – and yes, “freelancing” does include parenting, there’s a reason that we factored in two half days of daycare to our budget for this year!

If you don’t schedule free time you still need to take it, only every day off feels like a failure or a guilty pleasure, depending on which way you’re wired. I tend to get both at once. Having been the person who tried to get writing down in the cracks between other work and commitments, it’s hard for me to rewire myself to accept weekends, for instance, as down time in which I do not actually have to write. It’s been good for me to do so. The next step, one I’m still working on, is to NOT heap piles of work-related expectations on myself whenever a “holiday” is called.

For a parent of small children, “holiday” means disruption, lack of free time and an obligation (even, gasp, a desire) to spend quality time with said children. I am not saying it’s impossible – I certainly could dig my heels in and spend the next two weeks adding 12,000 words to my manuscript, but it wouldn’t be worth it. I would make myself and my kids miserable, I would stress myself out to the max, I probably would struggle to make every day’s workcount, and would feel like hell every time I fell short.

Crazycakes, in other words.

So I have retired my manuscript for the next two weeks. I can do some light editing on it if I want, or I can pick up any of the other writing projects I need to get on top of this year – Blueberry to edit, short stories to write, a paper abstract to think about…

But no To Do Lists. No lists and lists of goals. My plan is to hang out with my girls, read heaps, blog lots, and oh yes, concentrate on the book that is being released at the same time. If I get some writing done, that would be golden, but if I don’t, it can just be one of those productive fallow times.

Then, once Raeli is safely packed off back to school at the end of it, the real fun starts. One act to go. 30,000 words. Can I save the city? Can I squeeze in another sex scene? Even I’m not sure. It will be fun finding out.

I write for many reasons. Because I love it, because I’m building a career, because I’m not entirely sure how to stop, because it is something that is mine and is not remotely connected to mashed food and nappies, because my brain is full of books and they have to go somewhere… but oh boy, it does feel good to get off the treadmill occasionally and stretch your legs!

Mind you, after three days of non stop Snakes and Ladders I’ll probably be banging on Scrivener’s door demanding to be let back in.

I’ve talked before about the variable nature of writing work and productivity. It’s a sad fact of this job that it can be hard to tell whether a particular task will take you ten minutes, three hours, a week, a month, or a year.

Last night I had one of the most productive ten minutes of my writing career thus far!

I’ve been working away on book 3 for some time, and while I had a general idea of where I was going, I wasn’t entirely sure how the whole story was going to wrap up, and I had at least a dozen major problems to solve before I got there.

Last night, in the ten minutes between getting to bed and hearing my baby wake up (without FAIL, every night) the remaining part of the plot fell into my head. I just lay there, a little gobsmacked, as scenes unravelled in my head. I ran them past the various issues and loose threads I had, testing them, and they came up ‘clean’ each time.

I had solved, it seems, all of my book’s remaining plot issues, resolutions, characters needing closure, etc. All in ten minutes.

“Do you need a notebook?” my honey asked.

Me, faintly entranced by the final scene and the fates of almost every character hanging before me, waved him off. “I’ll remember this, believe me.”

“DO YOU NEED A NOTEBOOK?” he asked again, quite firmly.

“Yes, that would probably be a good idea.”

So now I’m in the rather lovely situation of knowing exactly what I have to write, between now and the end of the book. Of course, that is the actual hard work part, but it’s a relief to have a much firmer destination in mind. It’s also rather strange to finally have it pinned down in my head – who’s going to live, who’s going to die, and how the whole thing is going to fall messily around their heads. I think I might actually have all the answers.

Now of course I have no excuse not to write like the blazes – I don’t have to stop and wait for my ideas to catch up anymore! Onwards and upwards!

So April went pretty well, with me getting back into the pace of regular writing. The first week of May… well, I wrote 6800 words or so, which is not shabby at all, and yet falls short of the 7500 I was aiming for. 700 words, that’s not much, right? Except that these things are hard to catch up on and then you get left behind, and…

Looking back on the week I can see my errors. I did great for several days, not only knocking off the 1500 word target comfortably, but also burning through to do lists, which incorporate necessary tasks, housework, exercise, Pendlerook business, other writing/editing, and those things I’ve been putting off for weeks or months. I’ve discovered a few rules of thumb, like that if I don’t factor in exercise I don’t exercise, and that if I want to actually complete a day’s to do list, it has to be a) realistic and b) not have more than 10 items on it.

Things didn’t get problematic until Thursday, a day when I only have about 3 hours at home, and those hours with a baby, which means one naptime. Trying to pack a whole 10 item to do list into that day was a mistake. Deliberately cutting short the amount of writing I had to do that day, to make it up on my much friendlier Friday (in which I have five hours at home before the school pick up, with baby, and at least two naps) would have been fine if I didn’t also have to do items for Friday. 2000 word Fridays are possible if there is nothing else to get done. I was aiming for 2500… plus STUFF.

Btw in case it’s not obvious, ‘nap’ as a unit of measurement is roughly an hour to an hour & a half when the baby (not ME) is napping and I have time to do things without my attention having to be shared.

So yes, yesterday I struggled to get any wordcount. I did manage to get lots of other things done, but every time I returned to Scrivener, it was like pulling teeth. I ended up falling way short of my goal, which left me feeling crappy and unachievy.

Worse than that, the book was starting to feel empty and difficult. I realised that I had probably pegged my wordcount targets too high for the week (and thus the month) – I was producing words faster than my brain could produce story, which is pretty much the equivalent of trying to drive a car without petrol. It was a bit of a shock, as usually producing story is as natural as breathing to me, but I had underestimated how tricky this book is. I’m in the second half of a Book 3 which has so much to get done, so many things to achieve, and frankly I need to spend more time thinking about it and less time typing. For a bit, anyway.

Part of me feels very self-conscious about being so hung up on wordcount. if I’m an artist it should be about the art, right? Not just numbers and quotas? Which is of course true.

I’d love to be one of those writers who can write without being at the mercy of wordcount – who can just work and enjoy the book and let it unfurl like a flower. But I’m not. I need targets and small achievable goals, and the reward buzz of hitting my mark every time. More importantly, I am very aware of my limitations. I have so many other responsibilities and drains on my time, that pulling out an all nighter or an all weekender at the end of a deadline period is just not an option. I have a baby to feed, and a 5 year old whose feelings get hurt when I go all cranky and weird for no good reason. I have a partner who has put a lot of trust in me being able to balance family and work.

I need my weekends.

So yes, I do get rather mechanical in my planning and keeping track of what and how much I write. But I need to remember that the easiest way to produce fast, useful wordcount is to actually think beforehand about what to write. I need to do more of that. So I have dug out the old fashioned notebook and told myself I’m not allowed back into my novel doc until I have planned out 10 scenes.

I’ll give the 1500 words a day thing one more go next week, and if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to have to seriously revise how long it’s going to take to get this first draft written. Sigh. If only books were quantifiable. Whose idea was it that they should all be entirely different in the effort required to produce them? Anyone might think they had individual needs or something. Grumble grumble.

Weird to think that April was the first time I had touched Book #3 (which may or may not be called “Saturnalia,” publishers are hoping for something a little more X of/and X to match the first one… we’ll see… ooh how’s “Ides of Saturnalia”???) since NaNoWriMo last year (November, of course) in which I whipped out the first 50,000 words of this sucker.

By the time April rolled around, I was keen to get going, though a touch alarmed at my utter lack of an ending. At the end of this April, I am still no closer to an ending (well, okay, I have a bit of an ending, but not an ENDING ending, I definitely know what the climax will be) but I have a lot more meat on Saturnalia’s bones.

It’s only 20,000 words, but it was a key 20,000 words. And, you know, past the halfway mark, presuming the book doesn’t get delusions of grandeur. All good things.

At this stage I’m planning/hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up sometime in June, with enough time to redraft, polish, and make it awesome instead of merely ‘there.’

Third books are extraordinary things. You have to pay off everything that has come before, but also ideally it is a creature in its own right. I am hoping that each of my books has individual identities, but I’m pretty sure this one has lots of twists and turns coming that no one knows about. Which must be soooo fascinating to read about given how I’m not actually giving any information up at all.

The good news is that I got in a sex scene I wasn’t expecting, between two characters who definitely weren’t supposed to do that, but I can hardly blame them, as they had time to kill, and who wants to read half a chapter of two people waiting around? Not me! I’ll be interested to see the outcomes & ramifications of that little incident, I can tell you! Yes, writing a book is actually much like reading one, only it takes a lot longer.

I’m still building structure and plot and even a little extra world under my feet, so not yet at that exciting running downhill fast part of the book, but hopefully I will get there soon.

The writing part itself is getting harder, as in the physical act, because even as the book sucks me in and is inspiring me greatly, my baby has learned to crawl and is attempting to nap less, which means my 8:30-2:30 work day is shrinking into occasional bouts of 45 minutes or so at a time. All this and I have discovered that actually I really like having a clean house (and it does make baby crawling less stressful to have tidy floors) which SUCKS because as soon as the baby goes down for a nap my brain is all ‘yay, now we can CLEAN’ which I suspect means there’s something deeply wrong with me.

I have no idea when my edits for Book 2 are going to turn up, and I want to get as much of Book 3 as possible drafted before that happens. I’m trying for 30,000 in May given that 20,000 in April worked out so well. May and June especially will be all about Book 1, which will be fairly distracting…

Then, come September, though there will still be editing and proofing and all that stuff to do for 2 & 3, I will be able to write something new. Even possibly to sell something new, as I’ll be trying to sell on proposal first. I’m also putting in grant applications this year for a Nancy Napoleon novel, since I adore her and the timing is pretty good for some more Hobart Noir. New projects are afoot, haharrr. This writing thing is pretty awesome.

So no, as it happens, April Tansy does not grudge March Tansy that month of time off and getting her head together at all! Apologies to those of you hoping for a slapfight. I seem to be juggling things reasonably effectively right now. Though April Tansy is still snickering about the fact that March Tansy entirely failed to plan for those school holidays right at the beginning of the month. There are some in June too. TAKE NOTE, FUTURE TANSY!

Putting books on shelves is one of the most fun EVER things to do. Even if it has to be negotiated around the schedule of a cranky baby, who currently sleeps in the room full of bookcases & books to be moved. Which means that all clearing of shelves, moving of shelves, and filling carry bags/boxes with books to haul out, has to be done while she is awake.

You may already have spotted the flaw in this plan, which is that awake baby is awake, and does not particularly like sharing Mummy with books, and of course Daddy is needed too for the actual moving of bookshelves… thank goodness for the playpen. I would thank goodness harder if cranky baby was capable of sitting in said playpen for more than ten minutes before cottoning on to the fact that everyone else is having fun doing things outside the playpen, and screaming the house down.

So far I have a whole bookcase devoted to YA, and another one with an Ancient Rome shelf, a kids book shelf, a pretty old fashioned hardback shelf, an awesome specfic trade paperbacks shelf and several glorious empty shelves.

I have not yet dealt emotionally with the fact that I had more books that could comfortably fit on said shelves BEFORE the move started, and thus there are going to be some left over at the end of this process. Do not speak of it.

I managed to write 2000 words yesterday, again to the schedule of cranky baby. She is napping less, and needs more personal entertainment during her awake time, which is hard on the stay-at-home-writer, but it’s good to know I can kick into a reasonably medium gear on the last work day of the week if I need to.

After listening to the Underwater Menace on my iPod all week (a story I knew almost nothing about – fish people! Atlanteans! A mad scientist who wants to blow up the world because dude I’m a scientist who wouldn’t want to do that? I had so much fun that I decided to hunt down one of those fan-put-together telesnap audios I had heard was floating around the web and have been enjoying the Faceless Ones, another that I knew almost little about. I can categorically state that Pauline Collins would have been an appalling Doctor Who companion despite me having loved her in just about everything else she’s ever done, and I miss Ben and Polly already.

Further listening has brought me to the Bridging the Rift special episode about Chicks Dig Time Lords which is brilliant and interesting, and includes two of the book’s contributors. I’ve also really enjoyed some of the CoolShite on the Tube shows recently, especially their Rocky Horror soundtrack episode and their ridiculously involved and detailed review of Adventures of Power. Who knew there was so much to say about air drumming?

April has been a mixed month for me, writingwise. The Easter holidays and a whole lot of personal stuff smashed into me, to the point where I stopped, reassessed, and changed my plan. Instead of getting stressed of my week of no writing, I counted out how many weekdays I had left of April, and bumped up my daily goal to 1200 words. Sorted!

As predicted, though (and not properly prepared for) I’ve been finding it hard to get back into the swing of my book. What I really need is a spare fortnight or so to read through the thing and think my way into it slowly, but, you know, I took a month off. I have so little available writing time (and less each week, the baby is tapering off on naps, damn it!) that I have to have precise, small, achievable goals and keep them up regularly or the whole thing will fall apart.

That said, today is the first day this week that I didn’t make my word count. I spent the morning at Pilates (which I am loving in a freaky sell-the-concept-to-your-friends kind of way), came back to deal with the baby, and when I finally sat down to write, I struggled to get any words down. I gave up just short of 400, utterly bored with my book and myself. And you know, that was it, my one chance for the day. School pick up and parenting took over.

But you know, no excuses I need to prepare more for Thursdays, obviously. Need to do more of that ‘pre-scening’ our Richard talks about, so that when I get my single hour at the computer I can actually produce the goods.

I’m starting to suspect that this book will in fact be looooonger than the other two, and that’s going to affect my scheduling too.

So tomorrow is a day of write-write-write. It’s a very long time since I’ve managed 2000 words in a day, but it’s well past time I kicked myself up a gear or two. If I write hard and fast enough, I might even be able to reward myself with a battle scene. A sex scene might be more enticing, but you take what you can get!

The week has brought me lots of other good ‘pretend you’re a real writer’y goodness. I was finally able to release the cover art from Power and Majesty to the internet, and was asked for suggestions for the cover of book two (eeee book TWO). I had to come up with a last minute revision to deal with a possible glitch (or at least annoyingly unexplained detail) from my early chapters, which required getting my head inside that book again, while holding a baby on my hip. I was asked to contemplate alternate titles for the last two books – heh I really didn’t think I was going to get away with my Doctor Who homage with ‘Cabaret of Monsters’ but it was so worth a try.

The edits for book 2 will be heading my way at some point in the next couple of months. Time to get book 3 WRITTEN so I can get on with, you know, making it better. One step at a time.

There’s one kind of fantasy novel I haven’t discussed in any depth, and it’s the fantasy format which is most iconic as well as the most vilified. It also, apparently, sells better than any other fantasy format.

I’m talking about the trilogy.

The trilogy gets a bad rap, mostly from people who don’t read fantasy novels. It’s the equivalent of Fabio book covers – the feature of the genre most fixated on by outsiders. In truth, fantasy trilogies are popular for many good reasons. They are long enough that you can tell a really epic story and build up a thoroughly detailed world, but not so long that people start worrying about the author’s life expectancy.

According to publishing legend, the format came about when the hardback of a moderately successful novel by some chap called Tolkien proved too long to publish in a single paperback edition. It was broken up into three paperbacks, and promptly became a zeitgeist-making, record-smashing, hugely popular book of a generation, and then another generation, inspiring publishers to actively hunt “something a bit like it”. While many of the immediate successors to Tolkien did not in fact write trilogies, ultimately the popularity of this format is laid at his door.

There are many people who argue that The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy at all, but either a single book or six books. Do these people not recognise a zeitgeist when they see one? In recent years, developments in publishing glue have meant that you can in fact print a paperback of the entirety of The Lord of the Rings in a single volume, and many trilogies (not looking at anyone in particular, Ms Larke) are now made up of individual volumes long enough to challenge the limits of said wonderglue.

It’s not about the length of the books, though. Slender or fat, there is something oddly satisfying about a trilogy. A set up adventure, a making things worse book, and a resolving things in epic fashion book. I’m a fan of the format – and it’s interesting to see how these have taken over so substantially as *the* prime fantasy format. I seem to recall a greater percentage of longer ongoing fantasy series in the 80′s and 90′s – yes, Robert Jordan really did ruin it for the rest of us…

For a writer, a trilogy is probably the most saleable fantasy format, especially in Australia right now. But that’s okay, because a trilogy can be anything from three linked novels (Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters trilogy was each about a different character from a different generation of the same family) to one story over three volumes. There’s a lot of variation there, and no rules to say every trilogy should be the same.

There are many potential pitfalls, of course. Each book has to be satisfying in of itself. You may not know when writing it what the ultimate publishing schedule might be, and have to assume at least a year between reading volume 1 & 2. You have to make sure there’s enough happening in Book 1 that people want to come back for more, even though you’re really just setting up for more interesting stuff to happen later (if there isn’t more interesting stuff in books 2 & 3, you’re doing something wrong!). You have to try to avoid the dread ‘saggy bit’ in book 2, the bit that makes reviewers say it should have been a duology. Book 2 has to be The Empire Strikes Back, not Temple of Doom. Only you want Book 3 to be Last Crusade, not Return of the Jedi. (cough, though actually I kind of liked Return of the Jedi, never mind, move on)

Book 3 is the most important one. Book 1 has to be awesome, but Book 2 has to be awesomer and Book 3 has to be awesomest. It has to draw together all the traily bits and promises of Books 1 & 2. It has to fulfil all the promises. It has to resolve all the character arcs. It has to be EPIC. It has to have a few surprises in too, no point in just giving the reader what it says on the box… no pressure at all, then, for the trilogy writer.

Did I mention I’m writing a Book 3 right now? Yep, no pressure at all.

I haven’t done this before. Well, I have technically, but those of you who know the story of my first trilogy know that there are reasons why I might have a few hang ups about Book 3. By the time I managed to write a Book 3 that worked, I didn’t have a publisher any more… but that was a loooong time ago.

I can write this book now. It’s just big, the biggest thing I’ve contemplated in a long time. There’s so much to do! I’m throwing in all this new stuff in the final volume that will turn everything on its head and between you and me? I’m not entirely sure everyone’s getting out of this one alive. Here’s hoping some of them do, or this is going to be one depressing final volume.

Also I haven’t found the iconic frock for this book yet. Can one make a frock out of clockwork? It would look kind of awesome on the cover!

Cough. Okay. Carry on about your business. I have a book to work on…

There are no children awake at 2am. I might have to remember this for the future.

I spent a couple of productive hours reading through my doc and figuring out the big middle section of my plot, and then tuned into the game which started out promisingly enough, and then collapsed in a big messy heap. Oh dear, I actually said that out loud, didn’t I? The heap was in fact constructed mostly of Messi. That man is horribly good at what he does – if he ever loses the mullet for a better haircut, he will be diabolical. Shame he felt the need for some show diving in the first half.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, writing.

It occurred to me this morning that I really need to get this novel written fast, so as to get it set firm in my head how it ends before I start hearing responses to Book One that might divert me from my purpose. Also that it might be good to have a purpose.

Hmm I’m at the point of tiredness where the whole body starts to ache.

It further occurred to me that people are reading review copies right NOW, the book itself comes out some time in June, and really that’s not a lot of time to write 70,000 or so new words. And to find a purpose. Well actually I’m pretty sure I found the novel’s purpose around 4am, but that may have been a particularly strong yawn.

Why does it have to be school holidays… Mama wants her pillow…

Writing. Writing good. Must write more writing. I may have written the novel’s full capacity of sex scenes already. That’s a bit depressing. Also, pulling an all nighter just to produce 800 words is a touch depressing, even if they are awesome plot-heavy words and also the most I have written since last Thursday.

Zzzz

So, April has arrived. That means that Saturnalia: Creature Court Book Three needs to be well underway. My current plan is to write 20,000 words per month, which is my favourite sustainable level of writing – unlike Nano’s 50,000, it allows me to do some other things at the same time!

20,000 words a month means 1000 words a day on weekdays only. Factoring in weekends is still a new concept to me – it’s a little counter-intuitive when you have kids because your first thought is “oh, my honey is home then, this means tons of time to myself” which is of course entirely wrong. Weekends are nice. Having days when you don’t have to work makes for a better, more intensive working week.

Given that the 50,000 words I produced of this book during last Nano turn out to be actually pretty good (I KNOW, what were the odds?) I should have a half decent draft by the end of June.

Today, Raeli and I started bailing toys out of the playpen – Jem is going to need it stat, as she’s well and truly on the move. One of the essential writer’s accessories is a baby who is not currently choking herself on fabric scraps.

Tomorrow, I write again – I seem to have set myself up to do a sex scene next which is awesome- nothing writes up faster! I wasn’t going to have one that early in the book, but as Kaia said this morning, my characters have probably spent my entire “fallow month” in bed with each other anyway, so I might as well let them get on with it.

The writer’s daily wordcount is a great example of this. We know, as writers, that you can have a great writing day which only results in 12 words, if they’re the right words at the right time, and you can have a rotten writing day and still produce 3000 words (which may in fact have to be disposed of in a seedy back alley somewhere later). We know that setting a daily wordcount is an imperfect way of recording the progress of a novel.

But those of us who do track wordcounts generally do so because – you have to track something. It’s hard to pin down in a spreadsheet whether you wrote good usable words or crappy steaming piles of crap, but it’s easy to check the wordcounter and type in that today, you achieved 1146 more words than you had yesterday.

Sometimes a work day consists entirely of deleting words, and you know it’s the best thing for the novel, but you still feel glum when you enter a negative number in your little spreadsheet, or word counter. Much the same, I suppose, as someone exercising to lose weight, who knows they have put on muscle instead of fat, and thus have made progress, and yet… the numbers make them sad.

The main reason to track wordcount is that a novel is a huge, unwieldy thing. By dividing it up into small achievable daily goals, you can see your way out of the project, see your way almost to the end. There’s a huge difference between 100,000 words of polished almost-publishable goodness and 100,000 words of draft zero, and yet the numbers matter. They keep us going. They get us out of bed in the morning.

They provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

I honestly don’t know how writers who don’t keep track of wordcount deal with writing a novel. How do they cope without those little happy moments of achieving tangible progress? How do they deal with all the other things that have to be done in their life, if they don’t have a random number that they can hit each day and then feel satisfied that they have “done” their day’s work? Do they measure by hours at the desk? By chapters under their belt?

But there are some days when you can achieve progress, wonderful wonderful progress, without setting any words on the page at all.

I should be writing. I have a deadline for book three, which means I should be writing all the time. Except that you can’t write all the time without your head exploding. Even though it was getting tight, I deliberately took this month after the submission of Book 2, to be “Fallow Time.” In industrial revolution terms, for planting clover. I needed some time to settle, to catch up on life’s messy parts, to read, to work on other projects, to cuddle my baby and hang out with my big girl.

Also, to be honest, I needed a run up. This third Creature Court novel is the biggest thing I’ve ever tackled. It’s a huge, intimidating project, and it has to be pitch perfect, to justify all the work I’ve poured into books one & two. No pressure, right?

It’s been a good month, sort of hectic, and I have been starting to wonder if I’ve made a bad move, because if you’re not writing, other things fill up the writing time so easily. Things like washing up, and listening to school readers, and exercising. Would April Tansy be able to factor writing time into her day? The rest of us Tansies are kind of screwed if she can’t…

Today was writing day at  godiyeva‘s house. Given that I only have a week of March left, I thought it was maybe time that I organised my 50K of Nano words into Scrivener, to be all shiny and ready for April, when I have to turn them into a real book. (Last time I had to put a draft into Scrivener it took 4 weeks longer than I had planned.) It almost didn’t happen. We missed each other the first time, and the baby was cranky all morning, and I was tired from a bad night, and when I finally did turn up at  godiyeva‘s house, we pretty much just sat there and drank tea and talked about our novels.

It was really nice tea.

We had a marvellous chat about historical accuracy in fiction, and Winston Churchill, and just how racist do your 1900′s characters have to be, and how may female characters can you kill off before your book starts looking like Battlestar Galactica, and I confessed that in fact I had no idea about how Book Three ended, and I was starting to get a bit alarmed, because it’s due in July. As is her wont, she made several epic and awe-inspiring suggestions about how to end my book, made all the more entertaining by the fact that she hasn’t read Book One or Book Two.

G: What if the whole city collapses and you leave them to be eaten by forest animals?
Me: Actually they pretty much are the forest animals.
G: Even better! They can all be devoured by wolves.
Me: Yes, she’d like that.
G: It could be a really dark ending, like they have to leave the city and trudge off into the wilderness
Me: Actually I’m pretty sure that’s the light and fluffy ending…

Anyway. I opened my laptop, divided up my sections into Scrivener (it took about 15 minutes, which is about 3 weeks shorter than I was expecting that job to take) and headed off to do my chores.

While driving, and parking, approximately 5 minutes in total, my brain ran over the one single plot twist that I knew was going to happen. By the time my car had stopped, the entire climax had unfolded in my head.

Yesterday I had no idea where this final volume was heading, except that it had to be awesome. Today I know exactly where it’s heading, and why, and exactly what kind of awesome I need to work towards. I know what the final purpose of my most important characters is, and I have a pretty good idea of how to get them there.

And that, my friends, is a productive writing day. I may not have produced a single word to add to my novel, but April is starting to look a whole lot more interesting.