Pages

Monday, 22 June 2015

Woohoo, 60,000 words!

Today the work in progress hit the 60,000 word mark, which is my personal point of no return (see this blog post) and a cause for celebration, even though there's a way to go before I write THE END.

The novel is a time travel story, which I hope will turn out to be the start of a series. Time travel is tricky and confusing to write about and can make your brain go all squishy.

I like to have the end of the book decided before I start writing, and I've just realized I have to change it since it would fall foul of the grandfather paradox and my clever readers would notice.

It's not the first time I've changed the end of a novel at the last minute. I could see that the ending I'd planned for Replica was going to be predictable and possibly a bit dull, so I spent three weeks furiously mulling over alternatives. A few readers hate the ending I came up with, though I find it entirely satisfying. Most are taken by surprise - this may be an incidental advantage of changing the end well into writing the book.

Back to work. That ending won't write itself. Now, if only I had a time machine, I could whiz into the future and bring a copy back here and save myself a lot of effort...