This Life Isn’t Filled With Certainties, So Why Should Fiction?

I didn’t end “Amateurs Play Elsewhere” on a cliffhanger. It’s the last in the series and I don’t believe in ending series on cliffhangers.

The final chapter is an overall happy note, with the bad guys getting hit where it hurts and the good guys cheering a victory. Ta da!

But I’ll admit I did leave some issues unresolved. And some of my pre-published readers called me out on it. They wanted to know more.

I told them tough luck.

I said this with all love and respect. Really. These are two people who helped me out immensely in making the Dirty Politics series as strong as it is, and I owe them a lot. In fact, I owe the one the equivalent of $4,000 for editorial services rendered.

(Buy my books and I can actually afford to pay that debt! Just kidding. Kind of.)

Yet, I chose to discard their feedback on this particular issue. I didn’t ignore it. I actually thought about it quite carefully. But in the end, I decided to stick to the ending I’d already written. And for a very good reason.

You see, I like fairytales as much as the next girl. All of that happily-ever-after ending stuff? It makes my Disney-bred heart melt. But they’re not very realistic, are they?

This life we get to lead down here on Earth is filled with ups and downs, victories and defeats, and a lot of overall uncertainty. Despite our best-laid plans, we can’t determine the future.

It’s not ours to control. Never was, never will be. So why should our reality-based fiction be any different?

Let Disney keep its fairytales. I’m not trying to mess with them, which I greatly prefer to the original Grimm versions, I gotta say. Cutting off toes and heels? Ew!

But for anything that isn’t meant for little kids (of any age)… Well, those don’t have to wrap up every last detail. Not when I’m trying to make them realistic.

Sabrina’s Trials and Tortures Aren’t Entirely My Fault

Down here at Disney World, everything’s magical. For my Tinker Bell lookalike Sabrina up in Scotland, however, things are anything but in Faerietales Book 2: “To Err Is Faerie.”

I won’t spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t read “Not So Human” yet. All I’ll say is Sabrina is less-than-content at the end of that story, initiating a whole lot of drama as the series continues.

Which is why I have to acknowledge that authors are jerks. We purposely make our characters’ lives difficult however we can, whether romantically, physically, psychologically… You get the picture.

We make them lose their jobs or lose the love of their lives or lose their cool. Heck, the caption I wrote for “To Err Is Faerie” is “Martyrdom is all well and good ‘til someone loses a mind.”

Moreover, authors have full control over their finished works; don’t let them tell you otherwise. If they try to defend themselves after the fact, explaining how they cried over all the nasty things they did to their characters, tell them you have three words for that:

What. Ev. Er.

With all of that said, I feel the need to try to defend myself over all the nasty things I do to Sabrina in this upcoming book. (Yeah, yeah. I know. What. Ev. Er.)

But hear me out for a sec... You see, just because an author has full control over her finished work doesn’t mean she can say the same during the first stages. For example, during the initial draft of “Not So Human,” I found myself wide-eyed, wondering what was going to happen next.

It took me a good second or two to remember that I was the writer, not the reader.

Sounds crazy? Maybe. But remember: It began about a human and ended up a flight of fancy about a faerie princess. So clearly, I’m not always in control of how my storylines flow at first.

I have another novel I swore up and down wouldn’t turn into a love story… until my main character fell in love against my wishes. And I fully intended to kill off my heroine in a separate book… yet she not only thwarted my insidious plot but also inspired two sequels.

In other words, I don’t plot out most of my stories. And when I do, it doesn’t seem to matter. They happen how they happen. And after they happen, well, it’s really kind-of annoying going back and changing the whole thing.

So consider this my apology for torturing Sabrina the way I do in “To Err Is Faerie.” Don’t worry: She gets her Disney-esque happy ending.

Eventually.