For me, writing a novel is a lot like driving towards mountains. My outline points me in the correct direction and through the haze the distant peaks are dimly visible. I start out on the journey and those damn peaks don’t seem to move at all. Scenery passes by on either side, sometimes its tough driving and sometime it is lovely scenery, but my goal seem as distant and as elusive as when I started.

Then somewhere around the middle of the project, the mountains seem to close with a rapidity that is startling. At this point I afraid that I don’t have enough story and that before you know it I’ll be across the mountain range and my journey will be over far too soon. At this point I have to trust my outline, and not slow the writing with pointless meandering scenes.

The final stage is finding myself suddenly in the mountains, with loads more road to cover and no fearing that I have too much plot to cover in the remaining page count. Here I have to fight the urge to cut everything short, and work studiously at keeping all the elements I had planned on in the story.

Command and Control is now about 150 manuscript pages long, about 37000 words out of a target of about 100,000, and those mountains are suddenly closing in.