This week, I completed chapter 36 of ‘A Healing Love,’ which is now available for Postgraduate members on the story’s Ream Stories page.
But it wasn’t the chapter 36 I expected.
I mentioned in a previous post that I’d completed an emotional chapter 35 and was staring at a blank page with “Chapter 36” written at the top. But once I had finished “Chapter 36,” I found myself with two connected yet short chapters.
So, I combined them. I had worried that doing so would detract from the emotional impact of the original end of chapter 35, but it didn’t. The themes from chapter 35 carried over to chapter 36, adding to the whole thing when combined.
So when I today say that I’ve completed Chapter 36, it’s not the one whose blank page I was staring at in that previous post. What is now chapter 36 is something of a “transitional” chapter, moving on from the theme of the last few chapters and towards the end of the novel.
The manuscript is now over 165,000 words, and I may have to revise my estimate of the final word count of the first draft.
