The annual financial year-end crunch is upon us. The Peak Season for financial professionals the world over.
My ‘IRL’ job is in finance—I’m the finance manager at a small law firm. March represents our “Year End,” so naturally, February and March are the busiest months for me. It’s also, of course, coincides with the year-end for the nation’s tax system on April 5th, meaning those year-end pressures affect a lot of our clients, agents and other law firms too.
It’s also Payroll year-end.
So a lot is going on. There are…
- Deals to complete
- ongoing matters to invoice
- budget planning for the coming year to be done
- salary review to complete
- and more.
And to top it all, this year, there is a change to the Stamp Duty Land Tax regulations on 1st April, which means lots of people who would not normally be affected by “Year-End” are suddenly rushing to complete house purchases to save themselves some tax.
So, yeah—it’s busy, it’s hectic and a little chaotic, and it’s stressful.
With all that going on at work, when I get home, I’m still trying to complete “A Healing Love.” Evening writing sessions are proving challenging when your day job tires you out so much, but I’m trying to write a couple of hundred words whenever I can. Part of the problem, though, is that I really don’t want to finish this book.
No, that’s wrong. I want to finish the book. I just don’t want to write the ending.
When I started writing “A Healing Love,” I intended it to be the final book in the Paul Robertson Saga. I knew what the story was, what the ending was and how to get there. But it soon became apparent that, unless I was prepared for this book to be much, much longer (over twice as long) than the other three books in the series, it actually needed to be two books.
Which was fine, because I already had a clear break point in mind. In my original plan, it was already a book of two halves anyway.
I just hadn’t appreciated that each half would be quite so long.
What would have been the “first half” of a single book is going to end up in excess of 170,000 words long and that’s 50,000 words longer than the previous longest book in the series, “A Tortured Soul.”
But here’s the problem. When I started writing this book, it very much had a happy ending. Paul’s happy ending.
And now it doesn’t. Because it’s not really the ending, it’s the mid-point. What turns out to be the ending of book four is, in fact, the catalyst for the ultimate happy ending in book five.
So I’m faced with the challenge of crafting a bitter-sweet ending—and I know from experience that those are the hardest to craft. It also doesn’t help that one of the characters was supposed to act in a shitty way to be that catalyst I spoke about, and now I’m there, I can’t bring myself to write her in that way because that’s not who she is.
Or rather, it’s not who she’s become as I’ve written her.
The real problem is, I’ve gone and fallen in love with my heroine again.
This is very much a “me” problem. And I’ll find a way to get over it. But it’s something I’m going to have to force myself to do. Because I really don’t want to.
