Finishing a novel feels weird

I’m coming close to the end of the first draft of Killing Gods and I’m getting the same feeling I had at the same point with Powerless, an odd sense of “oh well then”.

I don’t write sequentially, I write like a jigsaw puzzle. I write one chapter here, a bit of dialogue or a nice description there, all from different parts of the book, until the whole thing is assembled like Frankenstein’s monster.

This means I don’t get to have that nice flow of the story straight from beginning to end, finishing satisfyingly on the final word of the last chapter. Instead, I’m ending this draft with chapter twelve.

It’s a perfectly serviceable chapter to end on I’m sure, but it does come with a sense of being underwhelmed by the whole experience.

Can’t wait to get my fingers into editing – that’s the first time I will read the book from start to finish as intended and see if it all makes sense.

I wonder if anyone would want to read it in the order I wrote it? Maybe I’ll do a Director’s Cut version for completists 🙂