Approaching the Finish Line

Am almost done with WIP.  Disclaimer, it is not Trials, which I know is what everyone is waiting for right now.  (Understandable!)  But it’s still a book that’s very important to me.  It’s much darker than my other work–sort of a dark fantasy YA version of Dexter–and I am, like, 8 scenes away from being done with it, though some of those scenes might turn out to be more like plot points and actually be 2 or 3 scenes, especially near the big climactic boss battle part.

I started this book about a year and a half ago now, or at least this version of it, and as I mentioned in my last post, I was pretty dead last year, thanks to poor thyroid treatment.  It feels like I’ve been working on this book a lot longer than that.  I keep recounting the time in my head and being like, “Are you sure it wasn’t two and a half years?”  Still, very slow for me, and there were times when I worried I was just going to be stuck in the middle of this book forever.  And I finished no books at all last year, and it wasn’t very long ago that I was also worrying that I might never finish any books ever again.  Even though I know from experience that that’s not true, it certainly felt true when I was a thyroid-less zombie with hardly enough thoughts to survive, let alone put in a book.

This also isn’t the first version of this book I’ve written.  I’ve talked about this before, but this is a book I first wrote 6 or 7 years ago.  That version was pretty flawed, though I loved it so much at the time.  And it got me my first requests from agents, though ultimately that was all it got.  And it kind of broke my heart that nothing ever happened with it.  I spent years blaming this book for being a failure, and resenting myself for loving something so horribly flawed.  Well, the book had issues, but there were still things about it that made it good–reasons why it got any agent interest in the first place–and so I’ve taken those good things and transported them into a new, better book.

So, anyway, my point is that while it’s always amazingly awesome to finish a book, finishing this one is going to be extra awesome.  And then, once it’s done, I will be working like mad to finish up Trials.  Which is also awesome–I know because I was rereading some of it the other day and had to force myself to put it down and not get sucked in, at least not until I’m officially working on it.

What about you guys?  Are you close to any finish lines of your own?