Completing the 1st draft of The In-Between opens the way to publishing two novels before the end of the year. And there’s a new one on the way.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
I have just completed the first draft of The In-Between. Earlier in the year I finished another novel, The Boy in the Book. I’m hoping to publish both books before the end of the 2023, but there’s still a lot of work to do, editing, refining and doing the layout.
Finding an ending
Writing the end of The In-Between was quite a ride. Things accelerated the closer I got to the end. By the time I was five chapters away, I was writing a chapter a day. But that wasn’t the problem, although not much else got done. The dilemma was that I had no idea how it would finish. After fifty-one chapters, there was me with less than a chapter to go and still no notion how to wind it up. I should have been alarmed, but I felt strangely calm. ‘Don’t panic’, Douglas Adams famously said. Using a trick I recently discovered of integrating a current difficulty with writing into the story, I found a way through to what I was pleased to discover led to a satisfactory conclusion.
A new book clamouring to be written
As invariably happens when I reach the end of a book, another one clamoured to be written. This time was no exception. The cover, the possible title and even half of the first chapter were done before I had a chance to stop them. I had to resist its pull to ensure I finished The In-Between. Now I have to continue to resist if I want to get both The Boy in the Book and The In-Between published before the end of the year.