So I went through and edited chapters 28-33 this weekend, re-jigged the ending a bit, got it closer to final. It would do now, but no doubt could be improved. I went back and forth through the last three chapters looking for places to possibly insert a line or two, and ended up not doing so, because in the end I decided that the information I wanted to add was either already implicit, or that adding it would be too leaden and unsubtle, so best left unsaid. We’ll see what my beta readers think of that decision.

Still 100% on the progress bar, no graphic.

It now feels finished in a way it did not last week. I know there is plenty of work to be done, and look forward to it, my notes made during writing, and added to my Very Detailed Plan™, will guide me after I leave it a while, then try to read it without stopping to put in fixes. That will be quite a challenge!

This week, as I have not been writing new fiction, I have written three blogs about the disconnect between the fantasy I thought I’d write as a boy, and the stuff I have written, so far, as a man grown. The gap between inspiration and expression, so to speak. I plan to streamline it into a one or two blog discussion.

I also wrote a blog about destiny in fantasy, which I love to read about, but find philosophically limiting, and a destroyer of agency. In many ways my books are very much about freewill, and the freedom to act, and how constrained my characters are by the world they live in, and how they chafe at that limitation, yearning to be free.

I also had a conversation about reincarnation, (not my first), and living multiple lives learning lessons, until the soul that has passed through many lives attains enlightenment. It was fascinating, as I have always wrestled with that one: if enlightenment is becoming one with the universal consciousness (and you can define enlightenment in other ways, but that was my working definition in this chat), then overcoming the self, setting aside ego and the temptations of the physical world, would seem to be essential. Who ‘you’ are becomes one with the universe/universal, and any individual identity across thousands of past lives is left far far behind.

I found this intriguing, as have many others across many generations, and expressed it far more elegantly than I, because of my obsession with freedom. The freedom my characters want to win is for themselves, for their loved ones, maybe for the world, depending on where the story goes, and that freedom suddenly seemed to me to be very much of the self, of the ego, and not particularly enlightened. It is an achievement to be unlocked, to be won. The desire to be free is perhaps a powerful, seemingly benign, obstacle on the road to enlightenment as defined very loosely above. One that in the end, pun intended, the long journeying soul must be free of.

But enough of my cod philosophy! I was just kicking ideas around for fun, and then in that environment of thought, finished my Hemingwayesque edit-as-I-go updates to the text. I hope you’ve had a great week—stay curious, my friends! (And occasional relative.)