Word count: 32,052.

Writing over the past few days has been going really well. I’ve found the scenes I’ve been writing more interesting than what’s come earlier in the book. The scenes are tighter, tend not to wander along tangents for the sake of bloating the word count (even though that really is the goal this month).

I’ve had a few really interesting ideas so far of how to lead into the ending of the novel. I’ve always had a vague idea of how it was going to end, but it’s one of the fascinating things of writing a first draft: sometimes you write something, it might just be a throw away line of description, but it’ll be something where you just go “Oh, I can make use of that little bit of information later.”

And that’s the thing that can be really fun – when it’s the little details that provide the solution to the hero’s problem right at the climax of the story. It reminds me of “The Fifth Element” – it’s only about a third of the way through the story where Bruce Willis’ character is lights a cigarette and you notice a single match left in the packet. And then it’s that match that provides the solution to opening one of the rocks in the climax. For the reader, it’s a kind of “a ha, that’s what that was about.” Devices like that are always much more fun for the reader than the “Deus Ex Machina” – the God from the machine – that swoops out of nowhere at the last moment to resolve the story’s conflict.