Everything's Really Wrapped Up Nicely

So now, as I announced on Facebook the other day, I am finished with the climactic scene of my horror novel, my evil little girl has been defeated, I've written 82,000 words, and I'm ready to wind the book down and have my characters live sort of happily ever after. Except some of them are dead.

I think the death thing wound up all right in the end. I had originally thought that I'd kill a character I really, really liked and leave alive a character who was all mixed up and not the most likable person there, but I switched 'em up instead. In this way, my resourceful character lives, and the other one doesn't get the chance to un-mix herself, which is really a shame. It was a nice compromise for my emotions.

I think it'll only take me another few days to write the rest of the book. I think. Unless there's more there than I thought, to wrap up. This one I really would like to set aside for a couple of weeks before I start revising it to an open-door draft. I've got some short stories and other fragments that are straining at the bit to get written, so I'm thinking those will occupy me once I'm done with this book. But maybe not; maybe I'll get to outlining my next book, the Marilyn book. Or revise a short story that I think has potential but needs sustained effort. Or just take a breather.

Infinite Jest is taking a lot of my mental energy. I mentioned before that my ability to advance in it comes and goes. I'm in a phase where it's coming (heh), and am just about at page 600, after spending a million years between 450 and 500. I'm guessing that everybody finds different aspects of this book interesting, depending on the individual; I find this long conversation between two spies in Arizona, interspersed throughout all the other stories all braided together, to be deathly boring. But during one of the most recent segments of their conversation, I learned something that ties together two big aspects of the plot. I had never presumed it was a waste of time to read the segments about them, of course (if any author has a method to his madness, it's Wallace), but it was still nice to be rewarded conceptually for dragging through tens of thousands of words that are like stones dropping on my head.

In other news, I got the idea in my head a week or so ago to do the Warrior Dash. I think the only reason I want to do it is to say that I did it. I've been wanting to accomplish a 5K for a couple of years now, and just haven't settled on a time or place, or gotten around to training myself to be able to run that far in a sustained fashion. (I can run about a mile and a quarter before I've had enough. I know that's not very far - please don't make fun of me.) The Warrior Dash looks like a lot of fun and a genuine challenge for my soft-shell never-really-tested body, even if it does also seem kind of insane and really not a good idea for my soft-shell never-really-tested body. I keep waiting for a good bit of logic to talk me out of it, and I keep not running across anything, except for not really wanting to put in the effort to lift weights and run a few miles a few times a week to train. And that's no reason not to do anything, not wanting to put in the effort.

As you may have noticed, I've been trying to write consistently every other day here, after that embarrassing gap of a couple of weeks while I tried to get a grip on my schedule. The problem is not having as much to say about writing every two days as I do about other things. Since it's just us, here, I don't really mind that, as long as you don't.