17/18ths finished

I finished Chapter 17 last night just before 11. It's a little rough at the end -- the tone isn't quite what I'd been shooting for. It'll take some polishing, but I'm almost done!

I may have to sketch out chapter 18 too. I might as well; I've now done it for the 3 previous chapters, and it made writing them a little easier. I have ideas for big scenes in my head for 18 -- a few of which had been there for a year or more -- but I'll need to see if they all fill out the size the rest of the chapters seem to have been, which is about 9-10,000 words each.

And even then it won't be "finished," as in, ready to send of to a publisher. The first half of Chapter 1 is a little rough, since it took me that long to find my voice. I'll probably end up re-writing a lot of that, if not all of it.

And there are some scenes I want to add, scenes that flesh out the characters a little more. For example, there needs to be a little more of Sam and Alex getting to know each other right after they meet. I'm also going to write a scene where Sam walks the cross-country course behind the school, remembering what it was like before she got hurt. She'll probably have a talk with her old track coach too, about coming back to the team in the spring if she can.

And there needs to be more of Greg Bierko scattered through the story. He suddenly shows up at Jen's party as this menacing figure, but I don't think it's set up well enough, since the only time we meet him before that is the scene with Sam's detention in Chapter 4.

There also needs to be more of Emily in the story. She's basically the axis around which Sam's misery spins, and as it stands right now she shows up when it's convenient to advance the plot, but no more.

Other than that, it'll mostly just be tweaks and smoothing out the wording here and there. All I have to do is write about 9000 more words, and I can start.