Endings are hard
Still not done with the current novel's first draft. I expected it to be 90K, but I'm past the big dramatic climax, past 100K, and still have a scene or two. Having the "do I dramatize this scene or just do it as a narrative summary?" dilemma.
Endings are harder because I don't practice them as often. I feel pretty confident about my ability with opening scenes, and middles have gotten steadily better over time and particularly over the last two years.
But endings. Ugh. I don't have any sense of the pacing there.
I know the dramatic climax of this book isn't climax-y enough; there's a lot of rewriting needed to set it up. But I feel confident I'll be able to do that.
It's the denouement. I have a lot of emotional loose ends from other events in the book and I want to tie them off, and create the setup for the next book, and do it all without reducing this book to feeling like a "filler" novel.
The problem with not plotting out a book before writing it is that you can kind of lose focus in the first draft. But as I have noted before, that's the only way I can do it. When rewrite time comes, I'll outline what I've got and then use that as the basis for the rewrites.
I suspect what I've got is pretty good as it stands--certainly it feels more organized than the previous ones did in first draft. I take this as a sign I'm getting better at this novelling thing. But anyway, I want it to be tighter and more streamlined and to have the plots and subplots weave a little more cleanly. I have a tendency to drop some threads for a while. Don't know if they're dropped too long, or if they need to be thicker cables in the bits where they do appear, or what.
Structure is a thing. It's hard to see from the inside.