Done, done, done! I'd promised myself I wouldn't do another journal entry until the novel was done--and about five minutes ago, I typed the final line! (After much, much agonizing about that particular line....many revisions to come later, I'm sure, but for now I'm not going to think about that!)

Ohh, it feels good. And such a relief! About four days ago, the solution to all my convoluted plot issues finally flashed through my brain. Once I had it, it felt natural and like the only possible solution, the one the book had been building up to all along--but geez, I'd gone through some serious frustration before I finally realized what had to happen! The main plot rule taught to us at Clarion was--whatever makes things most difficult for the characters must be the thing that happens--which is a great and useful rule for building tension and troubles and exciting reading material. However, it does make for difficult crises for the author to "solve", at the novel's resolution! In every novel I've written so far, there's come a point, about 2/3 of the way through, when I've sat back and thought, "Geez. There is no way out of this for them, is there?" Eventually something reasonable has always occurred to me. But there's been an awful lot of head-scratching and angst in the mean time...

This has been Christmas Shopping Weekend, since it's our last free weekend before our familial Christmas travels begin! Not too much stress this year, thanks mostly to the lovely Bavarian Christmas market...not only are there lots of great gifts there, but for 50 pence you can buy a really delicious slice of Christmas Stollen cake with butter slathered on top of it. There's no better cure for frayed nerves, or at least for mine. Tomorrow we're planning to go whole hog and just buy a whole Stollen cake to eat during the week.

In the mean time, I'm hanging out waiting for a family phone call, but after that's finished, Patrick and I will head out to the pub for a proper celebration of the end of the novel. Woohoo!