I am sitting in bed in my pyjamas (ya gotta love retirement!), having just finished ‘repainting’ the last of the chapters of my new novel, The Tourist. There are now 102 chapters. The ‘last’ chapter is written, but the novel is not finished. I still need to bring the stories of all the characters to a conclusion, somehow or other. The story ends with the main character (the tourist) returning home from his travels, geographical and psychological. Besides plot and other normal features (character, moral, grammar, style, etc.) that need to be brought to a finished state, I need to complete the work of polishing the structure of the book on quasi-poetic terms. See The Tourist (1) to The Tourist (10) for what this means.

The next step in that process will be printing the manuscript. The paper draft will be reviewed in the normal way, to eliminate bad or unnecessary passages, to fix the rest, and to add what’s missing. As well, the paper chapters will be compared to one another, where earlier chapters have been ‘repainted’ for use as later chapters. The chapter lengths and particular types will also be reviewed in light of the graphs I created to review these features. Again, see earlier blogs for an explanation.

How much work is left? Something between a few months and a year or more. Hmm? Maybe I’ll just put the covers over my head!