All those pretty blue lines

This morning, I finished rewriting the climax of my novel.

I knew it was coming, so over the last few days I’ve felt myself s-l-o-w w-a-y down. The reason?

Yeah, you know it: FEAR.

A lot, of course, depends on a well-executed climax and mine tend to be, well, busy.

(Not that this is a bad thing).

For a few days last week I thought about the logic behind unstable dynamite (which would have been perfect, but just too, well, unstable) before rejecting it for incendiaries of a different sort.

Yesterday morning, I whined to my husband. “What if I screw it up?”

Amazing, isn’t it, how these scaredy-cat thoughts just keep recurring and recurring and recurring and recurring in us creatives.

“So, screw it up,” he said, well-versed in the script. “Then fix it.”

I got my pen; I huddled in bed with my notebook; I wrote.

And stuff, despite myself, my fear, happened. The ink skipped along those lovely blue lines.

Magic.

This morning, I finished, and the biggest surprise came when I arrived at the last line of one of my character’s arcs feeling really, really good about where he’d ended up.

Feeling grateful; feeling happy for him (the character, that is).

I’ve got 26 days left to go before my deadline for finishing a ready-for-second-readers version of this particular beast (the title of which remains a closely guarded secret).

Next week, I’ll leap back to the beginning to start another draft, and I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do: a character to possibly excise, and scenes to rewrite since now, after three drafts, I’m finally getting to really know these people.

So will I be done?

I damn well better be.

Let’s try that again.

YES.