No words today

I'm resisting the urge to write today. It'll bring down the WPD, but what the hey.

The last chapter has most of the pieces it needs, but I have a couple more scenes that I have to write. It will probably get split in two as it's over 9000 words and I've tried to keep most of the chapters under that. Right now it's a bunch of prose fragments, which need to be pulled into a coherent narrative somehow without writing a lot of filler. The very last section, which was one of my original files from two years ago, is in present tense and I need to decide if I'm going to keep it that way or rewrite it into past tense.

So there's work to do, but I feel dangerously unfocused. Yesterday I got a lot done by basically writing a bunch of key scenes without worrying about how they joined up. Then I tried to look at how to bring them together and my brain just wasn't up to it. Hence the enforced rest.

I may finish up over the next couple of days. Or I may just let it rest and work on it over the weekend. Either way, insh'allah I will be done well before the New Year. Then I'm going to declare a break, length TBA, before I tackle the first edit.

There's a lot less description and a lot more action in this section. Partly it's a reflection of Akshedhen's role in the story, and partly it's that his story covers a lot of landscape that I've covered before and I don't need to re-describe it. Partly it may just be that I'm tired and I'm not putting in as much description as I should. I'll decide that during the edit pass. But actually I think it's not a bad trend to have; it gives a feeling of acceleration towards the end of the book.

Tired. I'm changing the working title to The Brainsucker. When I'm done with the rough draft I'm going to look back over my blog posts and see if I can chart my mood swings relative to my WPD...