How will it all end?

The hospital bags are packed, the Moses basket is ready and waiting, David is on standby at work. All we need now is for the baby to decide that she’s ready to arrive. The question of when she will arrive is constant background noise to our life at the moment. Friends, family and David’s colleagues are ready to swing into action when the time comes – and with the kindest of intentions they regularly remind us that it could be any time now.

The anticipation of others is nothing to the tense expectation in our house. While the main question for others is when, for David and me there are even more questions: where will we be when it begins, which of the many possible challenges will we face, who will be caring for us in hospital, how long will it take, how will we cope? We have worked our way through the long months of pregnancy and we are almost there, but what has always mattered most is what happens at the end.

This week the question of what will happen at the end of A New World has also been exercising my mind. The plot is sketched out with a degree of certainty and the characters are beginning to make themselves known. The landscapes of Cornwall and the sea are knitting themselves together into settings for the first two thirds of the story. But how it will all come to an end is unknown.

The book will have a happy ending, or at least a satisfying one. But how to achieve this is a challenge. The heroine of the story craves adventure and independence, but how much can I reasonably give to a fifteen year old girl in 1800? It is relatively straightforward to get my characters into exciting scenarios; it is harder to get them out of them in interesting and believable ways. I also have plans for my heroine after this novel is finished, so I am trying to come up with a way to conclude the book without finishing her story.

For both the book and the birth, the ending is important. For both, the ending will mark the start of the next big adventure.