Gifts purchased: Some
Cookies baked: None
Christmas cards sent: Yeah, right.

All right, so I'm thirty pages from the end of the sequel, and I'm at a pivotal point. Not just for this book but for the story that follows. I really didn't want to be thinking this hard about book three yet. I wanted to take a little bit of a breather. But I suppose the fact that the end of book two wants to tie in so closely to book three is actually probably a good thing.

I'm sure you're wondering why, if I have a complete draft of book two, am I encountering issues like this? The simple answer is, I chickened out. I knew the conversation (the one I mentioned the other day) would be difficult--one that would leave us teetering on the edge of "is this really going to work out okay in the end?"--and I didn't want to deal with it right then. Zara had just slogged through conflict after conflict, essentially alone, and I thought we didn't want to deal with another one from someone who shouldn't be giving us grief. Except, apparently, I was alone in this thought. So, we plunged in headfirst into the conflict this time around and the trouble is, this repercussions of this conflict are big enough to potentially follow us into book three. Which is okay, except I haven't had a whole lot of time to think about this and sort of test the water to see which way everyone's going to go. And the area this conflict touches upon is more than just a delicate relationship between two people but also the culmination of the series' theme.

The kernel of truth at the heart of the series is the question, what do you do when you're called to be something more than you thought you could be? Something or someone you don't necessarily want to be? Something that will involve sacrifice and pain and making difficult decisions and being selfless. Zara does not want to be the one in charge of our little band of rebel Observers. She feels that she can barely keep her human life under control, how can she be responsible for the fate of others, possibly even the whole world? She just wants to be a good person and have her life go the direction she thought it would. In my mind, it's sort of a twisted version of the story of Moses. Except instead of burning bushes that talk, you get hot aliens with visions and psi abilities who are directing Zara toward her higher purpose. I hope that's not sacriligious. I don't mean it to be. It's just a different sort of interpretation.

Okay, I wrote more on this but had to delete it as it was very, very full of spoilers for book two. Basically, you'd know the end. Probably not the best thing to publicize before the book has even been finished, let alone published. I've got a few days off coming up in the next week or so and I hope to get through this last little bit of editing!

Anyway, here's something fun to do. Go to Barnes and Noble online and check out the list of bestsellers in the upper right hand corner. Yeah. It freaked me out for a second, too. But unfortunately, my book is not published by Phaidon Press, nor is it a cook book. But it's kind of fun to look at, right?