Hoo boy, it’s that time — I’m enter­ing the end of my book and this is a first for me.

I had a gen­eral idea all that time ago, of where this lit­tle story would be going but now that I’m star­ing it in the face, I’m find­ing it tricky (but inter­est­ing) to pin­point exactly how I want it to all round out. I’ve a few logis­tics that I’m fight­ing with, and I’m not at all happy with what I’ve writ­ten over the last few days… I’ve been incred­i­bly tired, fatigued and gen­er­ally in the mid­dle, nei­ther up nor down, but round and round. Call it the weather, call it work, but my mind has just been foggy when it comes to writ­ing actual, work­able, sen­tences. My word counts have reflected this, and yes, even the 1k + I did a cou­ple of days ago. When I think about it, I shake my head because I know that A) It’s not as good as the rest of the book, and B) I’m not at all sure it’s even going in the right direc­tion I want to go. Sure, I may not know where I actu­ally want to go, but I sure as hell know when I’m on the wrong path.

The begin­ning — that’s where I felt this before. A heavy eh about the whole thing (not the book, just the cur­rent scrib­blings), which prob­a­bly means I’m on the right track and lis­ten­ing to my inner-author. Yet still, it’s tak­ing a bit to shake the daze out of me and actu­ally fig­ure out what’s going on. The last thing I want/need, is a decent story topped off with a tepid close. The bulk of what I’ve been writ­ing feels like filler; that hor­ri­ble, mediocre-ness you feel when you think about what you’ve just writ­ten. You won­der, and not alto­gether briefly enough, whether you can even cut this all out and just do a cou­ple of sen­tences, and when those sen­tences would work bet­ter than the para­graphs you have, you know you’re spit-balling your story out.

I’m a panster, yes. But that doesn’t mean I lit­er­ally make it ALL up as I go along. I have a road map, I’m just not too fixed on a road to get there: over the hills, through the val­ley, on a plane or walk­ing on leather; it’s the jour­ney, not the means to me. In say­ing that though, some­times that can lead you to a few dead ends and you need to ask for direc­tions (and I’m a guy, so I suck at want­ing to ask for those things — give me a bot­tle of water and a pair of sun­glasses, and I think I can find Casablanca from the Pacific Northwest).

And thus… yeah, so… here I am. Not stuck, but unsure, uneven and com­pletely too knack­ered to pump out the end­ing I want. So what do I do? Take a break, hellz no! What’s that going to accom­plish: Write Write Write, that’s the rou­tine I have found and I’m not a fan of switch­ing to all kinds of tra­jec­to­ries, this can be evi­denced from my pre­vi­ous attempts to force a rhythm instead of just get­ting on with it and pro­duc­ing the words.

The End <— this is where I want to be. For now I have to keep mov­ing for­ward, but I’d rather lighten the editing/revision process by not cre­at­ing a NaNoWriMo-sized pile of crap to deal with by Feb­ru­ary. How did any­one out there feel, did you have issues, or lit­tle smudges of inde­ci­sion by the end? How did you fig­ure out what felt right, beyond, well, it feel­ing right…