Listening to that little voice.

You don't want to hear me whine about the job situation again, do you? We (finally) hired new 3 people, so what does the PTB do? Throw even more work at us!

Between training the newbies and the increased workload I've got no juice left at the end of the day. In fact my manager is angling to get another body on board but in order to justify (ahem) that, she needs to offer up some stats which means... yeah, you guess it, more work in the form of keeping record of (extra) hours put in daily and amount of work done.

::cue hysterical laughter::

So let's finally talk about the wip. I used to hold sacrosanct the morning commute for writing but that went by the wayside.

Partly because of exhaustion, but also because I was extremely frustrated. Just too many false starts and deleted scenes in this last bit (the new expanded/extended ending).

I could never get the pacing or the feel for the characters right. And every time I threw my hands up(figuratively) and hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on the last batch of pages I managed to squeeze out, a little voice in the back of my head would say '..you're having trouble because the story is finished.'



And I'd say, 'No it's not! I know what I want to do with this last act! It has meaning and reason!'

And I'd try again, even though I was getting a bit uncomfortable with the increasing word count because, let's face it, this story is a novella. That's the way it was planned and originally written. Now the word count was getting up in the category length and to be honest, even with the revisions I'm not convinced that the depth justifies the growing length.

So, last night on the way home, while I was scheming yet another way to find the sweet spot into this last act, when the little voice piped up again - '...that's because the story is done. You've done the big dramatic moments, you've had the emotional show down. All the tension is over. The story is done.'

This time I listened.

The ending of this story is not necessarily 'and they are so in love and live happily ever after'. but more about it being the point where the H/h acknowledge that they have something special, they care deeply for each other, they want to take the relationship to the next step with the long-term view being an HEA.

And more importantly, the reader believing that the HEA will come.

This is no HFN (Happy for Now) but more of an HFNAWOF (Happy for Now and working on Forever - the acronym police can shoot me now).

To that end, I feel optimistic about this story for the first time in a couple of months. I've got some cutting to do, some tweaking to do, and some writing to do on scenes that feel more organic to the story. It might be a little too optimistic to think I’ll finish this week-end, but who knows….

I'll check in with my progress.