I realized something yesterday, something huge. This novel I've been working on, it's a genre romance. There. I said it. I'm writing it for a target audience, and I have writer's guidelines in mind. I will say, right now, that having read romances for years and years as a teenager and into my early twenties, I knew there were a lot of bad ones out there. But I kept reading them because some of them were good. Well written. Engaging. Romantic. That's what I've been going for. I can write literary fiction and Be Serious; I can and have pulled that off. But it's been a much more fun ride, this silly romance. Really, really fun.
And perhaps that's how I got this far, and reached this realization: I'M ALMOST DONE. No, really. Yesterday, I realized that I only had one more big scene in mind, and that it was the denouement. But that couldn't be! I was only up to 65,000 words!
Then I checked the guidelines, and ahem, that's the upper limit for the slim-sided imprint I chose to target.
In eloquent literary terms: Dude. That means I get to write a few more scenes, and I'll be DONE. Which means I will type the words The End. That, of course, won't mean the end of work, lots of editing, and apparently, paring down to meet to word count, but that's a good thing -- there are several scenes in the book that strike me as background rather than essential.
But it's there! The end is coming! It's reachable! I could hardly sleep last night. Look at me, wasting all this time here. Need to be moving into writing.
1. 9:39
2. 1.5-2 hrs. (I'm at the cafe, and I've heard knitters converge here at 11am. We'll see.)
3. Working on Trixie scene -- this has to flare up. This will be the breaking point, the point where it gets personal.
4. 10:49, a little more than an hour, 66366
5. I finished the scene! And boy, it went better than I thought it would. Became vitriolic, which it needed to do, but I'm always nervous about writing that kind of thing. Too easy to let it get out of hand and out of character. A little bit worried that Cade departed from type a bit, but I can fix that later if so.
6. Tomorrow I'll get A to J's office, discuss new project and Tom, then the drive home....
7. I'll write at the cafe in the morning.
Exciting!
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