As someone once sang, and now, the end is near.
This has been quite a journey for me, taking something that started out as not much more than a heavily sketched out idea back last summer and sticking with it through the next seven or eight months to turn into much more than it began as.
With chapter thirteen up this week, I'm busy writing out chapter fourteen, and preparing for the fifteenth and final chapter, there being no narrative need to delay the final day's events, hence their being brought forward a day.
What a wild fortnight it has been for Luke!
It's also something of a curious feeling for me, to know I'm about to get to that final scene, the scene that's been in my mind all this time, that I've sown the seeds of through all kinds of scenes and places, and which will change their whole world.
I've also sown a few seeds for Book Two, too.
Over the course of these past few months, I've turned my desire to read exactly this kind of story into some quarter of a million words exploring the lives of Luke and Stef, Leri, and all the other secondary characters, and all the while The Thing has been present in the background and sometimes in the foreground.
And now it's almost done.
Once that final chapter is out, there will be a gap for a little while as I get Book Two properly plotted out, decide what characters I need to bring in and where, and how to get from the end of Book One to the end of Book Two. Again, I know pretty much where I'm headed, it's all a matter of how to get Luke and Stef and Leri there.
Moreover, after the humbling amount of positive response I've had for this story (some of which has been really touching to read, to know how much people have enjoyed this story) I need to decide what to so with them after Book Two's conclusion. Right now, I don't know whether or not there will be a Book Three, though I anticipate I will know this better once I work out the details of Book Two's plot.
So there we have it. By far my longest, most carefully constructed, and most thought about single piece of writing, and something I'm immensely proud to have achieved.
All I can add is thank God for all those videos on YouTube of summer afternoon ambiences, they've been a real help as background as I write in the depths of a Scottish winter.
CH