WHAT GOES UP

I'm a single scene away from finishing the first draft of my work in progress. When it's done it will be around 90,000 words of first person mystery set in the near-future. It's not a dystopian world, but it is a little dark and, unfortunately, not as unlikely as I wish it were.

It's a story of expectation and severe disappointment, of having to steer your life in a direction you never imagined or wanted, finding some measure of success there and then having it pulled away again. It's a story of the power of friendship and connection, of systemic deception and the relief of believing the lies that everyone else believes. It's about loyalty and cruelty. One day the characters might look back and say it had something to do with love as well.

It first arrived in my head in three parts: the world which is ours but both more advanced and - due to a single large difference - more primitive; the main character who is living a normal life, which is neither what she was born to nor trained for; and the final scene, in which everything changes.

And now it's time to write that scene, and I'm having a really hard time. It's not that I can't figure out what happens or find the words to convey it. No, I know exactly what happens. I just don't know if I can do this, after everything the characters have gone through. It seems so wrong, so unfair. I've been sitting here for a half hour, trying to argue myself out of it. For their sake.

And so, of course, it has to happen.