I may have told you that I wrote another book in November. While my Kickstarter campaign was running and my editor was editing and I was mama-ing with nothing much else to do, I signed up for NaNoWriMo and wrote 35,000 words. Not quite making the deadline or the goal.
January I added to it here and there until I had written a pretty passable 50,000 words by the middle of the month. I really like it. I began a first pass. Revising and editing and made my way through bit by bit. Changed the main characters name, now she’s Amelia. The main guy is now Hank-formerly Henry.
In this rewrite/revise as I neared the end I knew it would need to be heavily altered. The book is a retelling of a fairy tale after all, but I didn’t want the ending to simper. It should be happy like most of the best of the fairy tale persuasion (I mean modern versions of course) but not sappily. I feared that my ending was so sweet it would require a spoon full of salt to help it go down and as I neared it I knew it was true. Then it came to me. Amelia is no shrinking flower awaiting her rescue, she’s a pissed off bad ass and she reacts accordingly.
For about three days she was literally hanging off of a very tall something. I had written a ‘cliff-hanger’ and then couldn’t figure out how to climb her back off. This was a very weird experience. In the past, if I read a cliff-hanger I knew that the rescue was within the next few pages, already written, on its way. This maiden had no rescue and so she just dangled there in the back of my mind. I would mention it to the kids occasionally, “So, Amelia is still on the cliff,” and we would laugh.
Amelia’s not there anymore. The rewrite and revision is done. I’m ready to pass the story to a couple of beta readers. Yay!
I’ve written the ending of the story, Fly, and the last word is: waves.