I’m currently finishing the third book in The Chronicles of Albatar. My characters are now at the point when it all happens. I know what needs to happen, but I’m sitting here figuring out exactly how to get all the players into the right spots for it to actually happen.

I’m a pantser more than a plotter. I always know where my characters start and finish, but I don’t necessarily know how they’re going to get from one spot to the next until after I’ve written it. I do always know about some pivotal scenes along the way as well, but not always where they’re going to be in the story.

I’m sure all of you plotters are now sitting there thinking: ‘Well if she just had a strong scene by scene plot written out, she’d be all right.’ I tried that. It isn’t me. And what I wrote was awful, stilted, and didn’t allow my writing to flow. I did think for a while that because I’m mostly a pantser (see here for the definition of a pantser – or maybe I’m a plantser with a heavy lean towards pantsing), maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a writer, and then I went to the Newcastle Writers Festival, and heard Garth Nix speak, confirming he was a pantser, and felt a lot better. I mean, he’s a best selling author.

So, anyway, here I am, almost at the end of this story. Chaos is about to happen, but in a very specific kind of way, and hopefully there’ll be a bit of a surprise for my readers, if I’ve foreshadowed obscurely enough, just as soon as I get my brain into gear and doing what it should.

Maybe I should procrastinate a bit more by patting the cat, or making lunch first. Or finishing this blog post. I could even vacuum. If I didn’t need to keep my foot up to reduce the post-op swelling, I could be sitting in a coffee shop away from those distractions right now…