End of book one - the set-up for book two

This week I've finished my major edit of Genehunter.  The novel is intended to be the first of a trilogy, so the ending of the book is not the final ending of the story.  It's merely a pause in the narrative.

Ending a book one is a tricky task.  The story you've been telling needs to come to some kind of  close, a close that leaves the reader feeling satisfied.  But it isn't really an end, merely a pause in the action.   It's the place where I've arbitrarily chosen to chop up the narrative.

The original manuscript of what is now Genehunter was supposed to be a young adult novel, but it didn't work.  I'd committed the sin of dumbing-down my writing to what I thought young adults would read.  I've since read a lot of YA SF, and know that those books are every bit as rich as an adult book.

When I started to re-write Genehunter I needed to add that richness and complexity.  So I added two new viewpoints, both antagonists.  I teased out their motivations for doing ' bad' things.  And I strengthened Aris and Yull's motivations for embarking on a long journey across the continent.

When I got to the end of Genehunter I was only half-way through my original story.  And that gave me a problem.  I didn't have a Supreme Ordeal for book one.  The scene I had in the original book now occurs at the end of book two.  I had no scenes of rising tension towards the end of book one.

I solved the problem by writing a new scene.  A minor Ur-Vai character has been killed, and my protagonists have taken his body to his tribe's clan-caves for burial.  The dead cat was a charismatic young troublemaker, and this gave me the idea for my Supreme Ordeal for the end of book one.  I forced my humans to speak at a tribe meeting and explain how the cat died.  So it was easy to get one of his supporters to try and kill Aris and provide the danger I needed.

Then I needed a new denouement.  My characters have made a big detour from their journey, so I had the characters renewing their resolve to return to it.  I've made it even more important that they find out what's going on on Deon.  Aris's motivation for the journey is her desire to ask the bioship what's happened to her father, who was its pilot.  

I'm now happy with my re-written ending.  It provides a closure to the story so far, but leaves Aris thinking about the second part of her journey, the perfect balance of close and pause.