It’s time to blow up the blue aliens’ magic tree, everybody. Watch out for arrows, flying lizards, and the power of love.

So, I’m getting towards the very last act of All That Glitters, my sequel to The Oldest Trick (which is due out next year from Harper Voyager). For those of you who haven’t written a novel (or perhaps those of you who haven’t written one all the way through yet), the end is an unusual and difficult time. See, you’ve spent all this time working in the exposition, introducing the conflict, raising the stakes, and suddenly there you are: the end. This is where all the birds come home to roost. This is where the whole thing is supposed to explode. We have to reach the climax, here – no more noodling around. Get it done.

This can be a surprisingly complicated affair.

The funny thing is that I spend most of my time daydreaming about the climax – about how awesome it will be, the cool pithy one-liners I’ll have Tyvian say, the things I’m going to have explode, and so on. When I finally get there, though, everything seems to be in the wrong place. I mean, sure, I’ve set the stage for all the right stuff to happen, but assembling it so it actually happens is tough. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but the puzzle pieces are scattered throughout 200-some-odd pages of text and it’s up to your sketchy notes and foggy memory to track them all down. If you put it together wrong, well…remember when you and your dad spent an entire Sunday afternoon building that volcano that was supposed to explode lava and stuff? Remember how you felt when you got it to school and everybody crowded around in breathless anticipation and then nothing happened? Yeah, it’s kinda like that.

I think the most about the endings of my books. Beginnings are pretty easy, middles are my honeymoon period, and then comes the end. That’s where I sit, staring at the computer screen, trying to figure out how to manage the explosions in just such a way that they remain sensible and engaging rather than simply crass and boring. The problem doesn’t just apply to exterior conflicts, either – there are those emotional explosions to manage, too, which are probably more important. We’re getting to the point where the guy is going to have to kiss the girl, to where the young man is going to have to mature into adulthood, to where the hero is going to have to have his moment of epiphany – again, hard to manage. Go too far one way or another and you break the illusion; the reader sits back and sneers ‘that would never happen that way.’ Booo! Bummer!

So, back into the fray. The precise path to the end will become clear soon, I’m sure. For now, I’ve got to figure out how Character X is going to steal that kiss from Character Y without it being creepy. As you may imagine, I don’t exactly have a long history of being a masterful kiss-stealer (just ask my wife), so this is proving challenging. Anyway, be seeing you all on the other side.

Or when I can’t stand all the thinking and I come crawling back to blog-land for a breather. Whichever comes first.