Commentaries and Endings

We’re coming to the end of these author commentaries, but there’s one last thing about the Alex Verus series that I want to talk about:  the ending.  And by ending, I mean the very end:  the ‘Epilogue’ chapter at the end of Risen.  

Assuming you’ve read Risen (if you haven’t, you should DEFINITELY stop reading this post, and this series, right now), you’ll know how the Verus series ends.  But there were a lot of other ways it could have gone.  In particular, there were two alternate endings to the Alex Verus series that I considered:  

Alternate Ending 1:  Events unfold as they did at the end of Risen, but instead of retiring, Alex uses his new powers to reshape the Council, and the country as a whole.  Alternate Ending 2:  Alex dies at the end of Risen.  This single change causes a domino effect that triggers a long chain of increasingly bad consequences. 

Originally I was planning to make maybe two blog posts out of this, but once I started writing, I quickly realised that it was going to be much longer.  Both of these two endings would be multiple chapters (if not a whole book) if I actually wrote them for real.  I’m obviously not going to do that (I’ve got a new series to write!) but even if I only sketched out the endings in summary form, that still didn’t cover the question of why I didn’t choose them, and why I thought the current ending was better.  And before I could do that, I’d have to explain what I meant by ‘better’ in the first place, which means discussing what I think makes an ending good or bad.

So at the moment, my plan for this mini-series is as follows:  

On The Subject Of Endings (Index Post)ConsistencyThemeAlternate Ending 1:  Total VictoryWhy I Didn’t Choose the “Total Victory” EndingAlternate Ending 2:  Bad Things HappenWhy I Didn’t Choose the “Bad Things Happen” EndingConclusion

. . . which adds up to two months or so of posts, not counting any weeks I take off to do news updates about the new series or Ask Lunas or something.  So this is going to take a while, but I think by the time it’s done, a lot of your questions about the ending of the Alex Verus series will be answered.  

We’ll start next week!