On Cliffhangers and Cabbage and Kings

A long time ago, when I was a wee lad, my parents gave me a very nice birthday present: a Spanish translation of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring (at the time I couldn't speak or read English). That was my first encounter with a fantasy book, and I fell in love, hard, both with the genre and Tolkien's tale (it was a very-well done translation, which held well even when I finally read the book in the Queen's tongue).
As I turned to the last page, I desperately needed to know what happened next. I demanded to get the next two volumes, and that weekend we went to the nearest bookstore - only to find out the other two volumes of The Lord of the Rings hadn't been published yet. Once a month, we showed up at the bookstore (the only one in Venezuela that carried that kind of book) to see if the books were there, only to be told (with increasing annoyance on the part of the clerk) "Not yet."
This went on for three years.
I re-read The Fellowship a good twenty times during that period. I spent days (and not a few sleepless nights) wondering about what would happen next - would Aragorn kill Boromir for his treachery? What would happen to the broken Fellowship?
I also worked like crazy to learn English, because my father had three perfectly functional English copies of LotR in his library, mocking me for my inability to access them. By the fourth year, I picked up the English version of The Two Towers (you might say my interest in re-reading Fellowship had waned over the years) and finally got to the end of the story.
So, as a general rule, I'm not too crazy about books that end in cliffhangers. Even when I write them.
(Note: this entry in no way should be interpreted as a comparison between the New Olympus Saga and LotR - that would be like comparing a first grader's drawing of the week with the Mona Lisa).
I've been getting moderate amounts of flak over the ending of Doomsday Duet. I totally understand, and if you're the kind of reader who doesn't like cliffhanger endings and you'd rather wait until Apocalypse Dance (the third and final volume of the New Olympus Saga), I don't blame you one bit. Luckily, work on the third installment is going well and I am fairly certain the book will come out this Fall (I'm shooting for an October release), so either way you won't have to wait long.
And on that note, I've got to get back to work.
I really want to find out what happens next.