The End is (almost, sort of) Nigh

So – I’m coming to the end of the first draft of novel number three. There are only two more chapters left to write, I know (more or less) what needs to happen and I’m even still in first-draft-love with it. Nonetheless, I’m struggling.

In fact, my typing fingers seemed to have transformed into snails. And not just any snails. Obese, elderly snails in a going-backwards race.

This is probably partly because I have quite an ending in mind, which I’m a little scared of writing, but I also suspect that I’m on go-slow because I don’t actually want to finish. I’m aware that I’ll need to hide this one away for as long as I can possibly help it before I go back in again, on the editing attack, for draft two. And, as infuriating and disturbing as the writing has sometimes been, it’s also been such an exhilarating pleasure that I don’t want to say goodbye. Not just yet.

But there are a lot of things about to happen around these parts. There are more job things and children things that I need to focus on, and other-book things too (including finally finishing my creative writing MA and practising reading for next week’s Exclusively Independent event). I really should complete this draft – if only to begin it all over again, sooner.

But instead, what am I doing? I seem to be thinking about snails still, about how generally beautiful their trails are, and how strange their eyes and mouths, and about the snail hospital my sister and I ran when we were kids . . . And I’m even blogging about them too.

Please help.