Help! Intervention Needed!

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I'm almost done with Blessed, but I'm really finding a lot of reluctance in writing this last chapter. I know I'll have lots of revising and cutting and editing to do, so it's not like I'm actually saying goodbye to these characters. But once I finish, there is something so final about it!

Being a therapist, I'm trying to analyze why I have this unwillingness to finish writing Blessed. I know how it's going to end. Every night I tell myself I'm going to finish it, and then I get distracted (purposefully?) playing a widget game on my MacBook, writing a blog post, ANYthing but writing the end of this book!

Likely I need some sort of intervention, since I've been at this juncture for about a week. So I'm asking for writing motivation from this great community of writers! What helps you finish your novels? Why or why don't you have a problem with the end stage of writing the first draft?

Any motivation is appreciated ahead of time! Thanks!

It's All About the Inner Journey

So I recently finished Sweet Caroline, another chick lit-style book written by Rachel Hauck. Visit her site here. It struck me as different for several reasons, but the first and foremost was that the heroine didn't end up with the love interest as you might expect. There was the promise of something more between them, but it wasn't the culmination of the book.

This book put to mind that the true focus of this style of book is the heroine's journey, not the romance. And I'm such a romance-a-holic, that this can be a little disappointing! But then I thought about the true message to these type of books could be so much more powerful without the "fairytale" ending.

Let's face it...fairytale endings don't happen in real life all the time...so why should they in books? I guess there is the argument that since they don't happen in real life much, then we want to at least read about them. Maybe even so much so that when we read a book or watch a movie that doesn't end with everything neatly wrapped up and all strings tied, we get upset. So I think I'm going to try to have a happy medium in my writings. Maybe not everything will work out the way the heroine wants, but she'll dang sure get the man. Maybe?

Just some musings I've had today.