You have to know the end before the beginning, Part 2

In yesterday's post, I discussed developing the ending of Part 3 of Rome's Revolution. Sure there were loose ends. I knew I was going to have the VIRUS units detonate Kilauea and destroy MASAL. But what about the Stareaters? Meh. I'd deal with them later but then bang, it hit me, just like something out of Masters of the Universe, Rei, Rome, MINIMCOM and OMCOM would hold Aason over their head and instead of saying "By the power of Grayskull" they'd shout "we are here" like Horton Hears a Who. This was delicious!



Anybody reading the book now would think that it was all so clever to have all the pieces fit together so nicely. And I suppose it was. It certainly taught me you had to know the end before the beginning.

Once I posted Rome's Revolution, my very first Amazon reviewer told me that Captain Keller and the rest of the Grays were acting too crazy. This bothered me. I needed them to act crazy and try to start a war so I could get some peace on Deucado prior to the attack on MASAL. It seemed worthy of another book. I have already written about how The Ark Lords came about. But ending that book was a problem. Even after Rome discovered the Darwin Project, even if she and Rei could end it, what were they going to do with all the lunatics?

I couldn't put them in prison so I had to send them away but where? That's where Helome came in. I had tossed the presence of a Vuduri colony at Rogal Canduro (Alpha Centauri) about in Rome's Revolution but never had any plans to invoke it. Then boom, it came to me (again, probably in the shower) and suddenly the not-sex scene between Rei and Virga was not only funny but necessary to have my ending. Once I knew how it was going to end, the book wrote itself.

Tomorrow, the ending for Rome's Evolution.