The end - take five

I've just finished the edits to Panthera : Death Song, the second book in the series.  The book's now gone off for copy editing, and I'm waiting for my good friend Carol Westron's demon red pen to snake it's way across the pages.  

Getting to the end of a book you've been working on for six months is always a relief.  Made it!  The story exists, it's captured on paper, now I can't lose it.  But often the first ending I come up with has to be changed.

An ending has to be satisfying, and the end has to be the result of the actions the characters have taken.  No deus ex machina gods catapulting down onto the stage to save the hour, please.  But beyond that restriction, we do have a few options.  If we can write a clever twist ending, then our readers will appreciate it.  My mind works far too straightforwardly for that and it's not one of my skils.  

But I can write open endings that leave the main parts of the story resolved but a few loose ends.  For a series writer, this is a good skill to master.  The loose ends from one story can become the main plot of a later book in the series.  

I've also used circular endings, with the characters ending in the same place as they started.  In Panthera : Death Song the book starts with Ren at a concert of Felis Pandalis, and it ends with her and her brothers at another of Felis's concerts.  The last chapter also explains my choice of title.  

The ending also reiterates the ecological theme of the book, through the lyrics of the new song which Felis sings at that concert.  And when the gig is done, life goes on.  Ren and her brothers are meeting Felis for dinner, and Ren doesn't want to be late.  It's a short, sharp, chapter which wraps things up and leaves the reader with a sense of the characters moving on into the future.  A perfect ending for that book.