Today the work in progress -- my main book for 2013 if everything goes to plan -- will break through the 80,000-word mark. I suspect the finished manuscript will come in between 110,000 and 120,000 words. This means we are entering the endgame, approaching the third act, en route for the denouement.

Happy times? Well, yes. The best part of writing any book is finished. But this point does always fill me with trepidation on a few fronts.
<ul>
	<li>Every book has several potential forks in the road. Which one do I choose? How do I know it's the right one without writing a few alternatives and checking (which is hard work, perhaps unnecessary, but something that will be done if required).</li>
	<li>How do I keep up my enthusiasm level once I <em>know</em> exactly where we're headed? Up to this point this was a voyage of discovery for me, just as I hope it will be one day for readers. Now it's going to become a question of opening boxes knowing what they contain. This is different. I need to make sure the process doesn't become mechanical.</li>
	<li>How do I head to a climax without getting caught up in some rushing change of rhythm? This is a pretty measured, serious book. It will have a climax, one that's got some action in it. But it's not an action thriller. So I need to be careful to add that dynamism without throwing out the nature of the story that goes before.</li>
</ul>
There is, of course, only one way to answer these questions: to keep on and write the thing. Happily it's still only April, I have plenty of time in hand, and one month today I go back to Florence for a final week to wrap up what I hope will be the last threads of the narrative.

After that I predict some final writing and then it will be set aside for a month or more to mature before being taken out for the first revise. This is how writing works for me anyway.  And it's why I regard this as a job.