Regrouping

Our family enjoyed a wonderful holiday, and I hope you and yours did, too.

This week will be a transition back to sanity for me. While the major hoopla is over and done until next year, we have one more group of guests coming for New Year's.

The lull until they arrive on Thursday will give me a few days to think about my work in progress.

I had planned to finish the first draft by the end of November, before the Holiday Crazies commandeered my life. Didn't happen. I have about 20,000 more words to go. I will finish by the end of January, unless life throws me into the middle of a lake in some way.

During the frenzied days leading up to Christmas, I had bursts of thought about my protagonist, some of which I was smart enough to note on stickies. These are plastered around my desk and calendar.

I'm going to sort through them and attempt to put them into some kind of order. Some of the ideas may not work, others I know will. I'm crossing my fingers that my subconscious comes through with all the things I didn't write down.

Bottom line . . . I hope to have a solid plan for the ending before I start back into my regular writing routine next Monday.

This manuscript is either romantic suspense or a romantic mystery. I have trouble choosing the correct genre. I've always known how it will end, and a few weeks before the frenzy began, I discovered which man the protagonist chooses (which had been a problem). But now I know why she chooses him. And I have a better sense of the order things need to take to reach the ending I envision.

If I take these few days to really think about all this, and translate my notes into a good list, the remaining words should flow like good wine.

I hope.

Say a prayer.

Light a candle.

Ask your muse to call mine.