This Is Always Scary When It Happens

I sometimes wonder if it’ll always go like this, or if, eventually, I’ll just run out of steam, or the lights will go out.

I now owe a huge debt of thanks to the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet near my place. They just finished my book for me. Or at least, I was in their premises when the book got finished. The Fiance ended up coming home to work because her computer at her office couldn’t handle the load. So I went out to get lunch for us, and she wanted to be self indulgent, with the nearest self-indulgent fast food place being the aforementioned KFC. So there I was walking over to it in the mid-day heat, and going through my usual internal litany of “It’s fucking HOT, it’s fucking HOT…” when I started to feel pieces of story moving through my head and clicking into place.

Up until now, all I’ve known is that the story will end “somehow”, and will involve the key characters and quite probably a lot of mass destruction. I’ve always had a kind of shaky faith in my subconscious, because when I write these stories, I often feel as if all I’m really doing is taking dictation, or transcribing the movies that play out in my head that my brain plays for me. I rarely feel like I’m making this stuff up, so much as being just another viewer or reader who is having the story told or shown to me. Sometimes this happens in little snippets, and other times full blown scenes play out, and in this case, the entire last half of the book suddenly played out in fast forward.

It all came to a head as I was placing my order for the food, and I probably puzzled the counter girl quite a bit as I was saying, “One fillet burger meal and… and…”

And I wasn’t looking at her anymore, so much as a point above her, where I wasn’t seeing the kids working the kitchen, I was watching this huge chunk of movie rapidly unfurl in front of me, and there were people screaming, and people dying, and people doing what had to be done, even though they had tried to deny it for years, and then the aftermath, the way the world would be, and how the people that had lived through it coped.

And it was almost as if there was some voice in my head that was saying, “There. It’s done. I’ve given it to you. You know what you have to do next.”

And I do.

So even though there’s still something like 39, 000 words worth of story that has yet to materialize in my computer, the book, at least in my head, is now finished. The momentum that was building has sort of exploded and now it’s just a matter of trying to stay as true to that atomic mushroom cloud of story that’s still even now settling in my brain.

I’m just not sure whether this makes what comes next easier or harder. But it makes it far more certain.