Picking Teams

I'm down to the last few thousand words for my next book, and that's an interesting place to be. Not that I'm going to stop writing once I hit a certain word count, but I do have a target I'd like to hit, or maybe it's more an estimation of where I think I'll be once I have this all written out. The problem with being at the tail end of the writing is perhaps the writing system I use in the first place. It's a very sophisticated process in which I compile a shorthand list of topics to write up, and then pick a topic from the list whenever I have time to write. (Did I mention sophisticated?) Of course, I end up picking my ""favorite"" topics first, or at least the ones I'm most excited about writing up. And much in the way teams are picked in school in an order of descending skill, in the end you are only picking people because they are there. Because you are obligated.

So it's not that these final topics are bad, it's just that I am not as anxious to tell them. They don't sparkle in my mind the way so many others did. They belong in the book, but I am not as attached to them. And in the back of my mind is still this word count target, and the last thing I want to do is stretch these un-gems to be longer than they otherwise would be. I know, I know, if this is the extent of my troubles at this point in my life, I'm not in a position to complain. About anything. Especially authory things that bore the majority of the civilized world. But it's what's on my mind right now as I scrape together these last few thousand words from the handful of topics left on my list. Just the kind of challenge I relish.