It's the End but the Moment has been Prepared For (I have sticky notes to prove it)

Apologies for those who couldn't access this blog over the weekend – we had a domain name crisis, all sorted now.

Funnily enough, my thoughts have been very much on narrative endings, lately. How they work, how you drag all the threads together, how to make it satisfying, all that stuff. My head has been filled with the end of this book for six months now, and it still keeps pulling surprises on me. All I can hope at this point is that my characters don't gang up on me and murder me in my sleep. I would not put it past them!

I've always been fascinated by endings, and very critical of those that don't work, or that finish too early or too late. Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I love so much I could make a quilt of them to snuggle under on cold, sad days, always seems to me a little too hasty to finish, as if she stopped just half a chapter short of perfection. I allow this because it makes me less likely to stab forks into my arms in utter jealousy at how good she is. Then there's the Eddings duo and their lengthy, drawn out farewells which rival Tolkien for sheer self-indulgence (I'm pretty sure the end of the Elenium starts about a third of the way into the final book).

Then there are the perfect endings, the ones that make you feel calm and good (or awful, but in a good way) like "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," and Janet writing Thomas a poem, and "Placet" (by both Sayers and Willis).

I love writing endings, normally. There's a beautiful bumbly tumbly pace to them, like running downhill very fast. That moment when everything slots into place and you know all the scenes you have to write, and it's just a matter of typing, and isn't it a good thing you have those mad typing skills that almost keep up with your brain at moments like this?

This one is proving harder than most, probably because I have more POV characters than I've ever handled before, and no I can't kill them all off just to make the throughline simpler, and then there's all the pressure I'm putting on myself to pay off all the promise of book 1 & book 2… I really hope writing endings isn't like flying in planes or taking exams, which is to say something which seemed easy peasy when I was seventeen and gets harder and harder the older I get.

It's certainly less fun than heading for 'THE END' used to be, but that could be because of the inevitability of certain events which are not all fluff and happiness, so instead of romping downhill crying tally ho! I am more sort of sidling up a cliffface with a guilty look on my face as I dispense justice and injustice with pinpoint accuracy amongst my characters.

The end must be in sight, cos new books are leaping into the queue in the hopes I will pay attention to them next. Yes, I said plural. Anything less would be far too easy…