The Final Phase

Outlines for the seven remaining chapters

 Happy New Year to everybody for 2015. I hope you had or are having enjoyable holidays and are able to deal with the continuing adventures of Celia Thomas.

Because although I have not posted anything for a while I’ve been busy over the last ten days working out how to end this story. It has not been easy.

The difficulty was that I had too many strands that needed to be resolved. Nine in fact, so one of them had to go and I decided to ditch the idea which I introduced in the last chapter that Celia and the Colonel were about to find treasure in the secret cabinet in the wall behind the paintings. It’s kind of a shame as I liked the whole Famous Five adventure element that having buried treasure introduced and I had gone to a lot of trouble quite early in the book (Chapter 11 – Marcus mentions that the X-ray photographs reveal a hollow space in the wall behind the panels) to introduce the idea of there being something in the wall. Now I shall either have to rewrite various chapters to eliminate it, or else just leave it as a red-herring for readers to get excited about. I haven’t decided yet.

This still leaves eight themes that need to be dealt with:

1 What happens to the pictures in the chapel?

2 Does Tomi reappear?

3 What about Timothy Arnold and the Department of British Export Development?

4 How will the theme of human trafficking and Morfeus Herman be resolved?

5 Is the Colonel a good guy or a bad guy? Does he win his election or end up in jail/dead?

6 Are the tensions between Celia and Franz really all resolved? Should she tell him about her fling with Tomi?

7 What can Tante Ilse and Max contribute to the final stages of the story?

8 Is Ned still alive or not?

I’ve now managed to sketch out an outline for how to bring all these elements together which – according to my calculations – means that there are now only seven chapters to go. How long these seven chapters will take, I don’t know exactly, but let’s be optimistic and say that with luck I should be finished by June 2015. This is something like two years after I had originally planned, but – hey – what’s that between friends?

So, dear readers, stay with me as we approach the final phase. I hope to be able to post chapter 32 by the 11 January. Keep your fingers crossed!