I am down to the final battle scene in my WIP at page 425. Yes, I’m over my word count. Oh well. So it’ll give the reader more story to enjoy. Anyway, my heroes have to blow up a jamming device. I’ve decided where it’s located, so now I have to lay out the scene. It has to play in my head before I can put it on paper. Sometimes, I’ll use action figures at this stage. It helps me place the players on the field and move them through their parts. Scouting out a similar location can add sensory details. Since I lack military training, the rest I’ll make up. If I play it out through my heroine’s viewpoint, she’s a normal citizen like me (albeit with special powers), so I don’t have to use special ops jargon if I’m in her head. Then we’ll need the final romantic resolution, and I’m done. Almost. I’ve been working on critique group revisions. Once I finish those, I will do a line edit, followed by a thorough read-through to tie up all loose ends. Whew. Still a lot of work, but I find revisions a heck of a lot easier than facing a blank page.

Action figures, eh? I usually just have x's on paper, although I really don't like writing ANY scene where my spatially challenged shortcomings show through. In my last book, I copped out of the whole thing by writing something like, "an eternity later, which Dalton swore had been only seven mintues, the shooting stopped and the air cleared..." that kind of time jump. But my editor said she wanted to see those seven minutes on the page. Thank goodness for some good military assistance from the husband of a fellow writer, because I was in the hero's head, and the heroine wasn't even in this scene.