Meredith Mansfield, Author

A while back, I posted that I was stuck near the end of BLOOD IS THICKER. I’d lost the momentum and was having trouble getting it back. I played around with designing a cover for BLOOD WILL TELL for a while. (That’s still a work in progress, but it’s getting better.) But sooner or later, I had to come back and just find a way to finish BLOOD IS THICKER.

Well, this last week, I have. And here’s what I did:

I went ahead and wrote the last chapter. I had it all pretty much in my head anyway. That I could write with no problem. It was the stuff in between where I was and that ending that was the problem.

I outlined the half-dozen scenes I needed to get there. Generally, I’m more of a discovery writer than a plotter, but in an emergency I can outline. I usually just don’t find them very useful. I’m too apt to depart from them and end up being a pantser anyway. But, for a handful of scenes, it works fine.

Then I gave myself an assignment. Every day I would write one–just one–of those scenes. After that, I would let myself work on the second draft of MAGIC’S FOOL.

And that has been working for me. Just one more scene to go and then I can skip to the bottom and type “The End”.

Whew!