Year three of more research
The historical novel has a respectable way of not being written. The writer is in the archive. The notes are excellent. A new question has appeared about buttons, or ballast, or the exact hour of a tide in 1807. None of this looks like avoidance, because it is full of facts. It is still avoidance if the last chapter does not exist.
Fragments feel virtuous because they are careful. They are also invisible to readers, agents and the version of you that wanted a book. An accurate chapter one, revisited for three years, is not closer to a novel than a clumsy complete draft. Completeness is the thing revision requires. You cannot correct the proportion of a book you have not seen the end of.
Accuracy is a later pass
A finished, imperfect manuscript can be made more true. You can repair a rank, a journey time, a prayer, a law you misunderstood. You can cut the scene that existed only to show a fact. You cannot do any of that to a stack of notes and a mood. The ugly draft is a place to be wrong in private, which is the only affordable place.
Give yourself permission to be temporarily ignorant in brackets, and permission to be temporarily clumsy in sentences. The contract with the reader is for the book they will hold, not for the first file. Protect that future book by getting to the last page before you polish the first.
What “finished” means at this stage
Finished does not mean ready. It means the story has happened: the want has met its price all the way to a last consequence, every major person has been changed or has refused to change, and you know which scenes were detours. Eighty thousand rough words with an ending will teach you more than twenty thousand polished ones with a promise to continue after more reading.
Set a crude deadline and a crude quota that does not negotiate with the archive. When research panic arrives, write the scene with a bracket and meet the quota anyway. Panic is a sign that the work has become real. It is not a sign that you should return to the reading list.
After the ugly ending
Then, and only then, take the brackets in order and the howlers a trusted reader can see. Check the facts that carry plot: marriages, money, travel, the law, the things a person of that station could know. Leave the decorative certainty until the structure is sound. Many facts you were desperate to confirm will belong to scenes you are about to cut.
A book is a finished thing that can be made accurate. An accurate fragment is a hobby with good notes. Choose the book.
Try this
Write the last scene next, badly, in one sitting — even if the middle is missing. Then fill only the gaps that stop that ending from making sense. Accuracy waits until the ending exists.