Incredibly, its been one day over a month since my last update on book #7 of the Corrosive Knights series.

While I wish I could say I’m done with the latest draft, I’m not quite there yet.

However, I’m offering this update because last week I made it through almost everything and have only the conclusion of the book to revise before heading into the next draft.

Seems like not much of an update, no?

Actually, it is a big deal.

I don’t want to get into details as they would be nothing more than SPOILERS for a novel that I haven’t even hinted at what occurs in it, but before the conclusion there was a scene that I’d been thinking and worrying about for a very long time as to how effective it is.

I wrote the first draft of that scene a while back, did some minor revision, but now, as I’m on my current revision, I’m doing a top to bottom look and trying my best to make this one of the last drafts I do to focus on the plot and make sure all story elements are in place.  My hope is that when I’m done with the current draft, I’ll move from actual writing to mostly revision of grammatical/spelling issues rather than deal with the story proper… not an easy thing to do with all the plot threads I’m dealing with while hoping to conclude what is the finale of a seven book series that spans tens of thousands of years.

In this book, this one sequence is a linchpin, a point that required considerable buildup and, once presented, needed to have a maximum impact.

As it turned out, there was a character I created for this book in the early going that slowly, with each new iteration/revision, was relegated to erasure.  Though I had forgotten, this individual had, as it turned out, one final fairly big scene before the even bigger scene I was all worried about getting right and I completely forgot it was there.

At least until I arrived at that point in my revision.

That poor character’s scene, like the others, was destined to be removed but I realized much of the dialogue worked… just not with that character.  There was another character in the novel I wanted to expand on and suddenly all things fell beautifully into place.  I removed the character that I created for the book, inserted the one I wanted to have a bigger role, did some minor dialogue modifications, and… VOILA!… the scene worked, beautifully, and was an excellent primer/intro to the following, big scene that I needed to have work.

The “new” intro scene with the different character, as it turned out, did everything I needed to get us to that pivotal scene that followed and one strengthened the other.

Even better, the pivotal scene played out beautifully and I found myself not needing to do too terribly much in terms of revising it.

I know, I know, I’m being very cryptic here and anyone reading this has no freaking idea how important and exciting these two scenes worked for me.

Understand: Writing a book, as I’ve stated many times before, is work.

Hard work.

Over a long period of time (in my case a book takes between 1-2 years to complete) you incrementally create your story while revising and reworking scenes, sometimes re-arranging them like a weird jigsaw puzzle, until you take all those words and chapters and turn them into something that flows and, if you’ve done your work well, the result is something that really works.

Triumphs, at least for me, are often found in small things: A great phrase here, a great description there, a clever callback, a clever metaphor.  It isn’t until you’ve finished the final draft and are happy with what you’ve done that you finally feel a great sense of accomplishment and, hopefully, success.

It isn’t often when a sequence that’s been worrying you for a very long time seems to work almost like magic.  It’s even rarer that you realize with not too many changes two scenes work together to create this magic, and its especially delirious to feel this toward the conclusion of your book, when you want audiences to feel that same emotion.

That beautiful, wonderful feeling took me through Friday and gave me hope that what was left in the book’s conclusion would run fairly smoothly.

Today, that beautiful excitement is gone as I buckle down and revise the book’s end.

…then its on to the next draft! 😉