The Final Dash, part 1 (of 6)

OK, this is it.

Next week I will be leaving for Malaysia for my 5-day hike and after that there's a family vacation in the works. So this is an excellent opportunity to get the first draft of Simon & Sally wrapped up and ready for Nancy to edit, comment upon and return to me for rework. But holy crap...I still have 6 chapters to do and they are not doozies.

What's the problem? When I plotted the book way back in 2007 I felt I needed to have two main locations to explore within the 'element' of wood. Don't ask me yet, what that is about, but the five books planned for the series have a distinctive feel and topic range that is covered. Let's just rest with the fact that book 1 deals with forests. And I wanted a dualistic approach to one 'good' forest and one 'bad' forest. So far so good. With a small introductory setting leading into the first forest, a connecting of the two through an intermediary setting and a climactic setting, it made five different geographical locations visited by the hero.

Then Nancy, who was supposed to write the story, got a plate full of work handed to her and we agreed I would further flesh out the plot into 'one pagers', basically a page or two fleshing out of the main occurrences that would have to be described. Well, by that time I had included so much it became difficult for Nancy to find her personal freedom to write and it too similar to what she did for work (which was write technical manuals). There was no room left for her for fun and exploration. Too much depended on other things to be excluded. She got even more work, and finally we decided I would also write the story.

So here I am, with 155,000 words down (roughly 450 pages) and I still need to write one fifth of the book. Also, the settings have bloated out of control and I don't know how to stop it. The reason for the bloating is because I've taken too much luxury in getting to the point in the story where:

• the hero is introduced to this new world he is in,  
• the villain is introduced and the stakes of winning and failing are set
• the goal is clear for the hero to initiate upon and he has enough confidence to do it.

What still needs to be done though (in this second to last setting) is the final acceptance of the hero and his environment of the role and prophetic title that is rightfully his. For that a lot of explanation and dialogue has to occur for it to seem realistic. That is one part. The second and last part is the  final setting where the villain explains his ulterior motives, all the clues in the story are explained and tied together and the villain is defeated as per expected climax. These two things alone I will have to pump out this week, eye shutters on, without thinking of word count or spelling, syntax and semantic accuracy to a point where my fingers will be bleeding and my eyes shrivel up. But then it will be done and the resulting body of work be damned....

gulp....