Shuffling the plot

I'm writing the last chapters of my novel Renaissance this week.  And I'm having a bit of difficulty  coming up with a satisfactory ending for the story.

At first I didn't really have any big set-piece scene that could act as the Supreme Ordeal of my story.  I'd set up all these questions about the region of space my characters were going to, and hinted that the journey might be dangerous.  That was all well and good, but the problem was that I wasn't  delivering on that.

I needed a big space battle to threaten my characters.  But who would attack them?  Would it be the pirates who are around in the area, or the alien Mikk who are getting hostile again?  Then I thought of a way to set the scene up so that the military who are supposed to be defending my civilian ship are outmanoeuvred, leaving my main characters to defend themselves.

That gave me a good character development piece.  It meant that the ship's first officer, Bolek, who is temporarily in command on Renaissance, has to give the orders for the ship's defence. Bolek is the quiet, methodical type who thinks of himself as a bit of a coward, so this scene forces him to step up and become the courageous person he really is.

So far, so good.  But after the battle resolved itself I still had three or four chapters to go before I reached the end of the book.  I had a reveal of what had happened to a missing character in those chapters, but that wasn't enough.  My drama fizzled out three chapters from the end.

So I need to shuffle the events of the plot again, even though I've rewritten the chapter plan for the end of the book twice already.  Take three was needed.

What I plan to do now is reveal what's happened to the missing character first. Then the big battle scene will happen.  That needs to be much bigger and scarier than my first attempt, including both pirates and the alien Mikk.  And once I've done that I'll tie up the loose ends and make all the the connections.  That should move the important action much closer to the end of the book.

This novel has had the loosest chapter plan of any I've written, and I've already reshuffled other parts of it.  If I shuffle the events of the end too I should produce a much stronger story.

It looks like I've got quite a bit of work still to do before the novel's finished.