After several days of panic that this story was going to be five thousand pages and not finished in time, I looked up during a momentary break in the dust clouds and realized that I was suddenly and unexpectedly closer to the finish line than I thought. Which, honestly, was an enormous relief. I'm glad that knowledge came to me this past weekend, because the first three days of this work week have been an unholy mess, and if I'd had the stress of that on top of everything else it might have gone badly.

I believe I have mentioned that stories will not be on a schedule next year.

I have one scene left to do tomorrow. But it's not a full page and thus I can say with exactitude that this story will be thirty-one pages (I always knew it would be thirty or more; this is somewhat less than I anticipated/worried) and will not hit three hundred renders (which is a shock, actually).

For those of you who follow the roller coaster theory of story structure, the top of the lift hill (and thus the beginning of the downhill portion of the story) was reached on page sixteen, which means that this story is actually a balanced curve, or close to it; same amount of distance to go up as to go down. This is where the anxiety came in; I had been worried there was a a lot more downhill than there actually was.

Now I may have time to do a couple of Hallowe'en quickies!