The end to Wilful Murder is underway and aiming to be finished by the end of 2025. The first 70,000 words of Wilful Murder is set at River Don  and surrounds where as the last 50,000 is set at Penguin Creek and nearby locations.  Will Ann find another husband? This is the burning question to be answered and also when does the book end? My first readers are very keen to find out what happens next. While I know what could happen, I am not sure what should happen.

I pitched Wilful Murder to the ASA pitch workshop in July. I didn’t get any takers and realised that my first readers were right – I needed more to finish the book. The manuscript was the length of a finished novel but it was not complete. There wasn’t enough pay off – my main character Ann does not get enough of a happy ending. So I’m drafting the remaining scenes and adding in events from her later life to give a better sense of her character arc. She will succeed more and demonstrate how far she has come from her origins and her family.

As this is an historical fiction based on a true story of a person who lived, I know exactly when she dies. Do I keep writing until then? Will that be a sad ending because she dies at 49 years – this isn’t a bad lifespan for the times but it’s not as long as other characters in the novel such as her parents, her husband and her children and siblings. So it feels like it might not be the easiest to write and end on a positive note with a sense of achievement. There are a couple of interesting events in the two years up to her death though that are good plot points and demonstrate some of the relationships with her family and how well she has grown. I’d like to include them but I might have to bring them forward in time or move her death out in time.

One thing I don’t want to do is end the book when she gets married. It seems so corny to end the book at that point but it seems a high point of her life to get the guy. This isn’t a romance that I’m writing and I want Ann to be a success in her own right not just an appendage to a successful man.