At Last, The Key

Now just to get to the end

All last week, I was in a dreadful bad temper (on all levels), unable to sleep peacefully, and devoid of patience with myself and others, and all because I couldn’t see my way through to a decent ending for The Mortality Code. I spent most of my writing time rewriting, procrastinating, rewriting, trying to have a quiet word with my unruly characters to persuade them that the detail of what they were planning to do (and went off to do) wasn’t right, that they’d end up either dead or in a dead end with nowhere to go, and no way to resolve their conflicts.

Towards the end of the week, a part of all this fell into place, and I managed to strip out some unnecessary complications that had entered the narrative, and which would have caused problems further down the line (not just in this book but subsequent ones if there ever are any) as well as moving too far away from the historical record. And although, in all my historical fiction, I do massage the past slightly, I try not to deviate too far from what’s known at the top level. I do maintain that it’s the historical fiction writer’s prerogative to invent individuals’ actions and motivations and conversations as long as those fit in with what’s actually recorded as having happened.

I do, of course, very frequently curse myself for choosing to write novels which require a lot of research. It’s a pain, and too easily used as an excuse not to actually write.

And then, yesterday afternoon, just as I was going to go off for my daily 2-mile walk, I happened to sit down at my desk with the manuscript open on my screen, and the key to the whole ending dropped onto the page and solved everything that had caused the symptoms in the first two lines of this post. Bearing in mind Saturday had been a miserable day physical and mental health wise, this was manna from heaven for me.

I think now I’m only about 3k words from the end of the first draft of this book, which is a blessed relief. Now I just have to grit my teeth and write those words. Hopefully, by the time I write here next week, I’ll be done. And then that blessed period (not) of editing will start.