Less than a week before my 50,000-word deadline!

Though I'm confident that, this close to the finish, I'll hit my goal, I've realized, comparing the first week to the last week, that this home stretch has been harder. I thought it would have been the other way around. Of course there are plenty of times I'd rather be doing other things, watching a movie, shopping, going out with friends, but the problem is, I'm not sure what I'm doing anymore. Everything seems just more hodge-podge, like I'm obviously stretching paragraphs and trying to come up with the most verbose way to say something because I need to use up words and I'm running out of things to say.

I keep wondering, and where is this story going, anyway?

I know how it ends, after two years of teaching in China, I leave and return to Chicago. But the story, the reason why anyone would want to read about my thoughts and experiences, that, I'm finding, is the difficult part of writing a memoir.