Vacation was over and I'd survived with my sanity mostly intact. My first group of beta readers provided me with invaluable feedback and constructive criticism--for the most part. I had all kinds of ideas about how to improve the first two-thirds of my novel, but I wasn't ready to look backwards just yet.
I still needed an ending.
For the first time since I began this journey in 2017, I was truly in the unknown. I'd run through my outline and I had no idea what came next. Why start writing without an ending in mind? I was so excited by the ideas and the process that I couldn't be bothered to spend more time just thinking about it, I suppose.
So the bill came due and, without a plan, I started writing the final third of the story, knowing nothing except that the ending wouldn't be a happy one and it wouldn't be a cliffhanger. The first few chapters came easily, and then I crashed into a creative wall. The crew finds a Big Dumb Object at Neptune's L5 Lagrange point and... now what? They followed the path laid out by Atlantis, and there was saboteur among the crew, but...
What was waiting for them on the surface of the Ancestor Star?
Who would live?
Who would die?
Which crew member was the traitor?
So I wrote, erased, rewrote, deleted, and tried again. But I couldn't crack the climax of the story. It just wandered and meandered. I wasn't writing toward anything and it really showed.
As luck would have it, I ended up sequestered on a five hour flight with my laptop but without in-flight Wi-Fi. The rest of my work was inaccessible on Google Docs, so I opened a blank Word doc. I challenged myself to write the last chapter. I forgot my worries about how this all happened and simply summarized the consequences. It started like this:
The crew met in the Waiting Room for the last time. Aspire was ready to leave, and all that remained was the parting of ways.
Suddenly, I couldn't stop myself. In a very exposition-laden final chapter, I summarized all that had happened. The fate of each character. The agonizing decisions, compromises, and tragic consequences from along the way. Not a happy ending, but a bittersweet one with notes of hope for the future.
I plugged away for the remainder of the flight. Suddenly, it all made sense. This was the only way it could have possibly ended.
With this rough last chapter as my north star, I battled to the finish line over the next several months. Even knowing the end, I still had to fill in a puzzle, solve a mystery, and orchestrate a climactic confrontation, and that all took iteration and research.
Around Christmas of 2018, I put the finishing touches on it and sent it out the door to my beta readers. Below are the final paragraphs from the original last chapter. None of them survive to this day!
All of existence retreated away from Edred, receding into a giant, inky void. Was it nothingness? Was this the end of all things? He willed himself forward to follow the stars into the blackness.
The dark was absolute and tangible, sticking and clinging to what was left of his being. It should have been alarming, but it was more like an embrace that cooled what remained of his physical body.
He projected his mind further until two objects made their presence known far in the distance but still just beyond his grasp. The center of the void, the force that moved the universe, that bade the stars dance and pirouette: two brilliant blue giants. Stellar sapphires. They beckoned.
I’m coming, Edred promised the universe. And the universe nodded in response. The blue giants expanded, becoming everything, even as the man, the EVA specialist, faded. He dissipated into nothing more than a floating idea. A concept of love, determination, and desire forging out into the center of the universe. After some time, or no time at all, the idea of the man shrank away into nothingness, as well.
Zero.
Heady stuff. I intended it to be counterpart to the opening chapter of waking up from cryogenic sleep. I thought I was so clever! While the ending was pretty well received by my beta readers, these particular last paragraphs fell flat for them. I reluctantly cut this a few drafts later for a more straightforward final paragraph that remains to this day.
After nearly two years of hard work, I finally had a completed story with a beginning, middle, and end. I was so, so proud of it. Of course, a first draft is only the beginning.