Fin!

Ok, I finally went back to the story and cleaned up the ending chapters. I did it after reading "The Fountainhead" (I've found that reading helps send me back into writing mode). Besides the problems mentioned before though, I remembered another problem I had with finishing this book: other stories kept bugging me! There's this big project I have planned and little by little, ideas and pieces of it come to me and it's almost demanding that I concentrate on building it, abandoning all other writing tasks.

But a funny thing also happened recently: I miss my first story. You know, the one I wrote and hid away because of its atrociousness. It started nudging me. It wants me to come back to it. It wants me to finish it (had the same problem with the ending chapters). So maybe it won't turn out to be a trunk novel after all? I don't know.

In the meantime, I'm okay with what I cleaned up on the one I was working on, but there are still some unfinished parts. Because I want to expand it beyond the 60k, I came up with a few incidences that I currently have in pieces. I need to iron those out and then perhaps I will finally feel happy about it and feel that it's complete.

Another thing: beta 2 said she loved my story (I mentioned that the important thing was that she liked it and she corrected me)! She didn't get to read the end and it would be too much for me to ask her to reread it in order to get back into it so that she could read the end so I ended up just summarizing the end for her. Oh well. I think beta 1 won't get to finish either- she's on maternity leave and looks like she plans to just hold on to the last set of chapters she got for whatever reason, but it doesn't matter- they both expressed a great appreciation/affection for the work, and neither of them are the type of person who just lies to please people which is why I picked them; I knew they'd be brutally honest if they had to be.

So anyway, I'm still almost finished with this project I guess. A little further along but essentially in the same place. I think I will sit myself down and finish it this week. I feel lonely after finishing "The Fountainhead;" I either need to read or write to counteract it.

Fin?

Gah!
So one of my readers caught up to me about a week and a half ago and has the last couple of chapters to go (24-28). But I haven't given them to her because I haven't fixed them yet and I'm having a problem with it.
At first I thought I would have a week of fixing while the readers read the given section over a week, but beta reader 2 zipped through the middle to almost-end section faster than I expected, leaving me little time to revise.
The thing is, the climax has been reached, so she's not pestering me for the last couple of chapters; the major things have happened and/or been explained, and if she had had the last couple of chapters, she would have probably gone straight through the last section she read to the end since I think it flows that way and would pull the reader to just go on and finish.
So anyway, I'm having trouble finishing it. The raw material is there from the first draft written in November, and so far, I have improved some of the chapters while some remained pretty much the same, but most of it is virtually unchanged from the first draft; in fact, I have rewritten only one chapter so far, and rearranged another. But this last group seems to require a lot fixing. Or perhaps that's just how I'm seeing it, making a mountain out of a molehill. I just feel there should be more, but the story keeps telling me it's a 60k story; I doubt heavily I can squeeze even another 10k out of it, much less 20-30 k for an average-length first time novel.
So I guess I just have to listen until my subconscious says otherwise, and go ahead and strip the last couple of chapters to their essence, then add on if necessary.

I just realized all I just said doesn't necessarily go together and make for a cohesive blog entry.

Anyway, basically, I'm stuck on this ending part. Come on inspiration! Visit me this weekend!

Oh yeah, beta reader 1 finally got 11-15 yesterday. After that, she has 16-23, then will be in the same place as beta reader 2, but lucky for br1, there will be no wait time like there was for br2. As soon as she's done with a given section, I can hand her the next.