11/26/23
Sprint to the Finish
This is number thirty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
I USED TO HAVE an old horse who would plod along on a trail ride, scarcely picking up her feet—much like I feel when someone asks me to go for a walk. I could urge her into a trot, but we were not going to go any faster than the walk anyway.
Until we turned for home.
Suddenly, Peanuts was a frisky filly who could gallop all the way to the barn and not breathe deeply. She could smell the hay and oats and loved getting brushed down in her stall. She couldn’t get back to the barn quickly enough!
That’s a lot like getting to the point in my novel where I can see the finish. Everything gets focused on typing “The End.”
Sometimes to the detriment of the story.
When I wrote “The End” to Heaven’s Gate, the ninth and final book of the “Living Next Door to Heaven” series, it was with a great deal of relief and 1.5 million words in the saga. It took twenty-two months to write the series.
Before she drifted off to sleep, she reached up to wipe a tear from Heaven’s eye.
I wiped my own.
And when I looked at those last words, I thought “Oh, no. I can’t just end it there.” It seemed like I had run to the barn. Heaven’s Gate and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series are available on Bookapy.com.
I did something that I seldom do—in fact it might be the first and only time since I was a freshman in high school and my English teacher marked me down an entire letter grade on a short story for it. I wrote an epilogue. I set it twenty years after the last chapter and talked about all the developments in the Casa del Fuego and the Clan of the Heart. Who was born, who died, who got married. Then, I felt I’d truly completed the story.
“There’s just one question I have,” Doug said as we sat at the campfire. “You and I both have daughters about the same age. If they had come up to us in high school and said, ‘Dad, I’m spending the night at my boyfriend’s house with his other ten girlfriends,’ we’d have said, ‘Like hell you are!’ And we’d have enforced it by sitting at the door with a shotgun if we had to. What I want to know is what were those parents thinking?”
Oh, crap! I wasn’t done writing yet. But it couldn’t simply be a continuation of the story. It needed to be something that showed what the parents were thinking that allowed their children to create the clan and multiple relationships they had. I needed to write another whole book!
And I did. What Were They Thinking? had a very satisfactory conclusion that truly brought the whole story to an end.
With The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, I decided nearly two months before NaNoWriMo started that this would be a one-off book. I have no plans for a sequel, prequel, or series. So, I need to end the book with a firm finality. I can’t just rush to the barn.
I’ve chosen the ‘bookend method’ for this. I wrote a first scene that was detached from the story and centered around an inanimate object that had endured for two hundred years—the staircase. To bookend this, I plan a chapter that returns to the staircase. Here’s my initial outline.
Chapter 16: A Family United. The bookend chapter reveals that just as Preston is descended from Isolde Jerico and Joseph Carver, Erin is descended from Isolde and Drake Jerico, but, of course, no one knows that.
- 1. Preston and Erin have issues to work out, but the wedding is agreed upon.
- 2. Shannon and Royce reach a new agreement and decide to try living faithfully with each other for a while.
- 3. The wedding takes place on the Dragon Staircase and Preston and Erin move into the ancestral home. There is no question about who the parents of the next generation will be.
- 4. The final narration reveals the history of the two families, how Drake and Drake Jr. drove Arlen Jerico away and that even though he was nearly penniless, he survived and prospered as a carpenter “back East.” Erin Jericho Scott was among his descendants and thus the two sides of the family were re-united through fifth or sixth cousins. Which none of them knew.
During the course of writing the story this month, I’ve made notes of other loose ends that need to be tied up in this chapter. This chapter will be just as long as the other chapters in the book and I will be sure all the major questions in the book are answered. By using an impartial narrator I’m not tied into anyone’s POV to record what happened. Most importantly, I don’t need to rush to the end. I can spend as much time as I want on the wedding, for example.
Ending a story on a satisfactory note is always a tricky prospect. I saw a meme recently that asked “Why can musicians just fade out at the end of a song instead of ending it? Novelists should be able to just print in smaller and smaller type as they repeat the last five words they wrote.”
Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.
The last words of the story need to be as well thought-out as the first words. There needs to be a sense of catharsis, fulfillment, and satisfaction when the reader closes the cover.
Though it has often been suggested that I look in on the family of Tony Ames of “Model Student” again, I felt like the end of The Prodigal was a perfect note to conclude the series on:
As I drifted between waking and sleep, surrounded by so much love, my only coherent thought was, “I need a bigger chair.”
Are there more things that could be written about the characters and their lives? Well, they are interesting characters, so yes, probably so. However, I project that any additional story about them will be as ancillary characters to someone else’s story. This story is finished.
And so is The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. Or at least it will be this week. There is always a sense of joy, accomplishment, and let-down when I reach the end of NaNoWriMo. Next week: “TGIO.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
