Writing a New Ending

I've had the opportunity to devote a lot of time to writing as of late, and feel that if I don't take the opportunity to do it now, I'll never have it again. So, I've been writing and editing, writing and writing a lot these past few weeks. I think its paying off - the proof of course will be when I try to shop this thing around. Most of what I've been reading lately is good - there's not a lot of cutting and rewriting anymore. I'm not sighing and asking myself why I wrote so much terrible nonsense. Not to say that everything is golden - there are still rough patches here and there.

Today I made it to the end of the draft and started writing a new ending to the novel (the GIANT). I was afraid of this - I know what the ending is - I don't have an outline, but its only a chapter or two. I do have a number of conversations sketched out as well. BUT - for the most part it would have to come out of my head and end up on the screen - the screen that is blank. To counter this end of the line blankness, I pasted in a paragraph that I had cut from the old ending, but wanted to rework into the new ending, so I could fool myself into thinking I was just rolling along with the edit as I've been doing for months now.

Turns out, I didn't have much to fear. The words just poured out of me, which was a relief. It was going so well that ideas for further along in the ending were coming to me, so I wrote them in as well. Not bad.

While I've been working on the computer, I've been hand editing a few chapters from earlier in the book. They are the first three chapters from the NOW section of the novel (see earlier posts if you're confused, but NOW is basically the second half of the book). There are some ROUGH stretches in these chapters. I've discovered a shortcoming in that I have trouble describing places. Description of action comes much easier for me. This is something I'll have to work on.

As soon as I'm finished with this hand edit, I'm going to make the revisions to the digital file. Then I'll go back and edit the as yet not finished new ending. From there I'm going to go through the whole thing again and check for errors - hopefully it won't need much intensive editing. If all goes well its a spell check and I'm off to look for agents and publishers.