WE'RE NEARLY THERE. My brain screams as I'm half a chapter away from one of the scenes I have been dying to write for two years.
I have written a version of it, simply to get it out of my head. To get the image to make some modicum of sense so that when the time came, I might be able to line the pieces of the puzzle up and plop it into the chapter it would belong in.
This has been a tough journey in the last week to get to this point. Simply because I knew where the story needed to go, I just wasn't entirely sure how to get it there. Then today when I was driving the image flashed into my brain of what to do. It made all the sense in the world - I just needed to tap into the antagonist's brain for a few minutes to figure out what he would do. What his motivations were and how he would hold a no-backing-down attitude at this point, because everything he wants rides on him unleashing everything he has with no warning. No snarky comments, no witty one-liners, just action.
And though I dreaded writing this third of a chapter, and my mind had to think through how to phrase the action as it collided and snow-balled in my brain, unfolding like a soundless video in my brain, we're nearly there. Nearly to the precipice of this book, of what will domino effect everything after. What will unroll the future and all of its possibilities and all of the theories of what's to come and dangit I wish I had an audience so I could hear their theories and pop onto their forums and see their diagrams and enjoy their opinion of what lies ahead. Because everything from here to the end of the book will formulate questions and will hopefully leave the audience to rack their brains on what they think the future holds. To possibly even see someone snag the throwaway comments littered throughout books 1 and 2 and say, "What if this means this based on what happened in this chapter of book 3?"
Book 3 was always supposed to be where the real climax of the whole story took place. And it kinda did in the first draft but this time, this time, I feel like we're actually getting proper story from me. I'm actually crafting something worth asking questions on and formulating opinions in.
I'm back in that college mindset where I see it's midnight and say, "But can we? Can we just stay up and smash out this section, regardless of how late it gets? We can run on 3 hours of sleep, can't we?"
Can't we?