I’m nearly there, everyone! My most recently written chapters are now in the hands of my book coach for review, and the very–last–chapter has been started. *Whew!* I can see the finish line now, and that’s a great feeling.

To help me get through these last few thousand words, I’ve got a great behind-the-scenes team cheering me on.

First, the peanut gallery–courtesy of my youngest daughter. They mainly offer ideas, and sometimes point out typos and other little mistakes I’ve made as I’m writing. I can only handle them in small doses though. Like most birds…well, how to say this delicately…they simply talk too much. I know a lot of writers enjoy background noise and even music while they write, but for me to immerse myself in a totally different world, I need to be able to tune out this one. Peace and quiet while I sit at my desk helps my imagination flow.

Then there’s tech support for all those pesky Windows updates that insist on pushing through whether I want them or not. Usually as soon as I walk away from my computer, too. I’m always afraid I’m going to lose whatever I’ve been writing when that happens. So far I’ve been lucky! The problem with losing a piece of writing is, no matter how good your memory, you’ll never re-create it exactly the same way twice. Cera is 18, so she’s got a lot of experience at walking across keyboards. Somehow she knows how to make my computer do things I never even realized were possible.

Finally there’s my moral support team…a few of them anyway. Yeah, that’s me somewhere under that pile of animals. Their job is to keep me wedged into my seat so that I can’t wander off and get distracted by other things. It’s so much easier to just keep writing. I’ve learned to be ready to grab my laptop at any moment though to keep it from crashing to the floor. A ringing doorbell means the world is quite possibly coming to an end, and it’s their job to warn the whole neighborhood about it. They take the job pretty seriously!