Having rattled along on my current book - The Perilous City - at a rate of 4,000 words per minute for 38 weeks in a row (which for the mathematically-minded makes for over 150,000 words and counting) I have suddenly found myself coming to a crunching halt, though I hope it is a temporary blip rather than a full-scale meltdown. Why has it happened?
Two reasons one understandable, one less so. First, I have been away for a week in Stockholm, work-related and that proved impossible to combine with keeping up my galloping rate of writing. Fair enough, I'm back, things should be back to normal. But, something else is holding me up. I'm virtually at the end of a section, which should then lead me into the last part of the book (yes, so 150,000 words and not finished). But I'm struggling with two options for the same character/s, and I just can't yet decide what to do. One involves death now, one involves death later. I'm sure the Grim Reaper doesn't have these problems. When do you kill a much-loved character? (well, much-loved by me and you hope eventually the readers). That's something I'm still trying to judge in this case, and can't seem to resolve. But my real problem here is the galloping writing rate. Somehow my planning has slipped behind, and I now don't have a chapter plan for the last part of this book. So perhaps I'm going to have to take another week off from writing to do that, and to help myself decide on my character's fate.I'm loath to do it, but time spent planning is not time wasted I keep telling myself.
So, death hovers over her head, for a little while longer.
