Ending Throes

I am in the throes of trying to finish a book. At this point in a manuscript I drive myself and everyone around me crazy. I'm glaze-eyed, I stare out windows. I forget things.

It becomes particularly bad (as in for the past three days) when I get stuck. I have no time to get stuck, understand, but I do it just the same. Plot points I expected to come together aren't quite making it. Or I can't figure out how to make them happen. Or happen at their best. I wouldn't have this problem if I didn't have Character A doing this, Character B doing that, and Character C doing something else, all going around each other, all with their own motivations, which mess up someone else's plot line. A can't do what I thought she'd be doing right now, because she's with B, and B wouldn't let her, and C ...

Aayyo, as my grandmother would say.

The thing that really gets me is--when it's all finally, somehow, who-knows-how-I-managed-it written, and I read it over, the story all looks so natural. Of course it had to happen that way. Everything just dovetails and works, and why in the world was it so hard? Why didn't the writing just flow from my fingers?

My wonderful husband's patience really gets a work-out during these times. He tries to be supportive and stay out of my way. But good husbands require a certain amount of care and feeding, and he's certainly lacking for my attention of late. Oh, I feed him. My mind's just ... not all there.

I have a few days this week to try to get unstuck and hammer out pages--before the hordes descend for the fourth. I still don't know where we're going to sleep everyone, and what I'm going to feed everyone, and right now I don't have time to think about it. These things have a way of working themselves out.

This post is now done, and I can only hope I've made half a lick of sense.

In my next life I'm a secretary.