Deeply unsatisfying endings

Endings are still the part of a novel I struggle with most. I need to wrap things up without going on too much.  I have to tie off enough ends without going into tedious detail, and I often get it wrong at first.  

Even though I do detailed chapter plans for each novel before I start work, very often I end up rewriting the last dozen chapters.  One of the reasons for this is that I get to my Supreme Ordeal - the point of maximum conflict - too early in the story.

That major conflict needs to come  close to the end of the story. I always need to wrap up some things after the main conflict is done, but I only need a couple of chapters for that.  But I've been finding that I'm getting to my Supreme Ordeal about twelve chapters from the end, and that's far too early. 

In some novels I've adjusted the story so that the major conflict occurs closer to the end of the storyline. In other novels I've left that conflict where it is and added an even bigger conflict closer to the end of the story.

The novel I'm editing now is one of those.  It doesn't have big battle scenes, it's s quiet quest story.  In a sense I could think of the Supreme Ordeal as the point where characters found out the truth about what's been going on.  It is a shocking reveal, but it doesn't involve conflict, so I've had to invent something else as my Supreme Ordeal.

Now that ordeal takes the form of reporting this shocking truth to a large gathering of big and very powerful cats.  Humans snatched their cubs and did something awful to them, so it was natural that these huge intelligent predators would be very angry with my Human characters.  This provided me with the Supreme Ordeal scene I needed.  After the humans have learned the truth of what's going on  they have to return a stolen dead cat to his tribe.  And they have to explain what humans have done to him.

Now I had a suitable Supreme Ordeal.  I could threaten my human characters with death at the hands of these angry cats, which was the conflict I needed.  And the return of the dead cat, and his burial by his tribe, provided the satisfying ending I need.  But it also left enough threads dangling for a second books. 

The father of the main characters is still missing, and the project head may be a dodgy character.  Those are both threads I'll pick up and develop in a second book.

This time I'm confident that I've got my ending right, and that it will be satisfying for the reader.