On books without endings.

Middles aren't supposed to have ~proper~ endings. They're the middle of the story! They're still part of the build-up.

this :)

Because Deadline doesn't have a proper ending, and they don't want to encourage this behavior from publishers.

Wow, that's an impressive level of dumbassery right there.

I am one that hates unanswered questions - my DVD shelf is filled with series that were cancelled on cliffhangers and will never be resolved (when I rule the world, cliffhangers will only be acceptable if you are guaranteed a resolution). But Deadline (however it finished, only 300 pages in!) isn't the end. I'm sure I'll be stamping my feet like an impatient toddler for the final one but even from Feed it was marketed as a trilogy.

Some people are daft.

On a complete sidenote: I've realised what I love most about your writing. I can never predict the twists. And I'm one of these people that didn't realise that the Sixth Sense was supposed to be a big shock because I'd already worked it out. I got to the first twist in Deadline on the train yesterday and my jaw dropped open. Got some odd looks, but it makes for fantastic reading.

Plus I got excited about the mention of autoimmune disorders. Possibly because that's my specialty. / DORK.

That's really odd. I've read a couple trilogies that were basically just one really long novel chopped into thirds, but the Newsflesh trilogy isn't one of them. Sure, the ending of Deadline had everyone saying, "WHAT?! I NEED THE REST NOW, KTHX," but that wasn't because it wasn't an ending. Or, rather, the very last bit felt like the very beginning of Blackout, whetting our appetites for the next book. But yeah, Deadline had a pretty solid ending, as far as I'm concerned.

And that bit about punishing the publishers? WTF?

And that bit about punishing the publishers? WTF?

It's the same kind of logic used by Amazon reviewers who give a book one star because they thought the Kindle price (which authors have nothing to do with) was too high :-\

See, I have no problem with books that end when everything's not wrapped up, when it's the middle book of a trilogy - like you said, that seems appropriate.

What bothers me is when authors do that on one-off books that they never had any intention of continuing on into a series (I'm looking at you, Robert J. Sawyer, and your "3000 years later on Mars" BS). If it's got major plot lines left unresolved, and no book to tie those up in the future, then I get cranky.

Also, I somehow think that this person isn't going to start a rash of people not picking up Book 3 in a trilogy because it "encourages bad behavior" - Book 3 is when you GET your proper ending, so why wouldn't you get it?

tl;dr - people are dumb.

Wait, seriously? They're expecting the middle story of a trilogy to wrap things up all neat and tidy? I'm sorry, that's not how planned (as opposed to accidental) trilogies work!

I think the problem is that the person writing is expecting each book to be more like an episode of a TV show. At the end of the show, the surviving protagonists go back home, the Evil Plot Of The Week has been foiled, and everybody can relax until next week. Sure, the Big Bad of the season is still out there, and the major romance subplot of the season is going on, but it feels different from the way Deadline ended.

(still completely ridiculous, but it gives me a handle on where this person is coming from.)

My parents were bought LoTR as a wedding present. Well, acually, they were given the first two volumes, they had to way a year or so for the final one. You want to talk cliff-hangers? They didn't quite murder the Best Man (whose present it had been) *g*.

But really, there has never been any secret that Newsflesh is a trilogy, and that basically means a story in three parts. Unlike a series which can be picked up in the middle (and often that's the only way the reader can find it, if the earlier parts are OOP), a trilogy is expected to be not quite standalone books. Oh, there are some wher it has obviously just been chopped for length (not quite in the middle of a sentence, but just at the end of a chapter with no type of closing), and I've got annoyed about that, but Deadline doesn't do that. I was -- OK, not quite 'happy' at stopping at the end -- comfortable with where it ended, just as I was with Feed. I certainly wanted more, I'm greedy, but it wasn't necessary. I didn't even continue with the 'teaser' for Blackout, since I reasoned that it was less likely to end in a satisfactory place (because the planned ending places were obviously at the publication points).

Hmm, that's an interesting point. There's the 'teaser' for Blackout, which isn't finished yet. Does that mean that the 'teaser' is in the way of being a draft, and so may change drastically in the actual book, or is that now set in stone and you have to start Blackout that way?

I will admit that I am planning on lending the trilogy to a friend and I told her that she should plan on waiting until after blackout is released because I think it will be more satisfying to go straight from Deadline to Blackout.

But I don't think an actual fan could drop the series at this point. And no one (besides maybe the editor) gets to try to influence where an author ends her books.

Um, if you don't want to read an unfinished story, wait for the rest of the series to come out...

I would be very annoyed with the ending if there was never going to be another book, because while some ambiguity is fine major unanswered questions don't make me happy. In a series, I expect some resolution, but major plots can still dangle. (For middle book in a trilogy, since I know beforehand I'm getting a specific chunk of a larger story, I can accept endings that seem like the story was just broken off when a page limit was hit. I'm still pleased when this doesn't happen.) Deadline would hold up fine as a series book, by my standards. More importantly, it seemed thematically right - after a major change in the status quo, whatever you're used to is over.

I'll also say that any literary 'books should do x' rule is going to have exceptions. I used to have two examples of what I thought were plot devices that would make me automatically give up on a book, because when I'd run across them it had seemed like an obvious authorial trick and I couldn't get back faith in the story. I've since found stories I loved that broke both rules, and one of them was Feed.

This made me think of Brian Keene's "The Rising". A lot of people had fits over the way the book ended, said nothing was resolved and they were left hanging. I didn't see it that way. But enough people complained that Brian went on to write "City of the Damned". imho, it wasn't necessary, but it did hush up (mostly) those who complained. Personally, I think "The Rising" ended just the way it should have.

The thing is, and I say this a lot and hear this a lot, people just don't want to think any more. They want to read and watch tv solely for entertainment purposes, and if something makes them think, they drop it like hot rocks. And it's the pits. It leaves those of us who do like to think and be challenge hanging out here on a limb.

That is lunacy. No one leaved "Empire Strikes Back" and said "No, Han Solo's in carbonite now; I won't be seeing the third one."

I disagree with the writer of the letter, in that I do not feel that all books HAVE to have a proper ending. The author of the book is setting a tone, telling a story, creating a world, and they and only they know what the proper ending of their book is.

My favorite example is Stephen King's The Cell. I will not give away the 'ending', because I highly recommend the book. But I will say that you wait with baited breath for hundreds of pages to see if something can be resolved...reach the penultimate moment...and the book ends!

When I finished the book, did I want to shake the ending out of Mr. King? Well, yes, I certainly did. I also wanted to shake his hand, because as a writer...I totally appreciated that he had left me hanging. I was mulling over and playing out in my mind how that damn ending went for months. It was a brilliant way to end the book.

As for the Newsflesh trilogy, that is how it has been presented from the start. And being a trilogy, I expected to be left wanting more at the end of each volume, with the middle volume being the most likely to cause hair pulling anxiety. The person clearly has no understanding of storytelling structure.

Look at Star Wars. (The original three movies, if you please, none of the others exist in my world.) At the end of Empire we are left on these notes...

Luke and Leia do not know they are siblings, and are confused by what they feel for each other.
Leia is falling for Han, but may never see him again.
Luke has lost his hand and is beginning the process of becoming mechanized.
The Empire is WINNING. Our heroes have no idea what their next move should be.

Yet, over the years, many people...fans and critics alike...have argued that Empire was the best of the three movies.

When it comes to Newsflesh...no one can judge the 'ending' yet, because we haven't READ it.

Now that I have truly exposed both the utterly high levels of my geekery, and my total lack of punctuation skills (thank Isis for commas, I use them for everything!), I shall return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Rise Up While You Can!

This just reminds me of people who complained about the movie of Fellowship of the Ring ending where it did.

I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

Vey is mir.

I am used to duologies / trilogies that are really one book. I prefer when these end on rest notes rather than cliffhangers, but if the work's good enough, I've got no problem with this. If the work isn't good enough, well, I have a different problem with it.

In the case of the Newsflesh trilogy, I already knew there'd be a cliffhanger. I've not read it, and no one has spoiled it for me except to answer my direct question about whether there'd be a cliffhanger. See, my problem isn't to buy or not to buy. It isn't even when to buy -- I have the book on top of the to read pile, and only one book I am obligated to read first.

My dilemma is whether to read Deadline now or wait a year, and well... we all know I'm not going to be able to wait.

Things that currently annoy me about books (which I not seen in any of yours):

-- Nothing really happens. Oh, it seems like stuff is happening, but afterwards, I realized that I read through a whole lot of nothing. If this is a book in a series, it's either badly written or marking time.

-- The status quo is reset at the end of the book, because we can't actually have anything change or resolve, now, can we? I'm not talking about "The character solves another mystery" -- that's legit, especially if we're talking about a series where a character solves mysteries. I have no beef with Sherlock Holmes. I'm talking about "The character solves a mystery, but nothing is actually resolved on account of it."

-- The Wrong Sort of Thing Happens. This is a really tricky call, because it's subjective. I'm talking about when the author's changed everything in ways that just don't feel right. Or maybe the author is always changing everything so that nothing is stable, which means that there's no solid ground for me to enjoy -- a character's personality will be rewritten on a dime to enable the latest plot the author has in mind. (Fifth season Buffy Troll episode, I am thinking of you.)

I am starting to get tired of the idea of a series that's like a soap opera, where there's some chunk or other for sale every X months. This is... not necessarily bad, but very much not to my taste.

It is also very much not the Newsflesh trilogy.

I think this sort of expectation stems from what seems like a very American idea that stories should have neat, tidy endings. When I took film classes in college, the students who were taking it for a humanities credit would bitch and moan when we watched foreign films with ambiguous endings. They're used to being spoonfed a solid, happily-ever-after ending, and when they don't get it, they feel like they've been cheated or something.

I've always thought that we need more ambiguous endings. They force you to think, and in the case of cliffhangers in the middle of a trilogy, they force you to anticipate.

I've just started reading Deadline, but I fully expected a cliffhanger, because like you said, it's the second book in a trilogy. I'm kinda shocked by the entitlement issues of that email writer. Seriously, who says that kind of thing? Sheesh.

*blinks* See, actually responding with an apology is awesome. I've known far too many folks who would simply eyeroll and 86 the thing without prejudice. Atta girl.

For the rest?

I got nothing. A proper ending? How the book concluded was as proper an ending any book with a sample chapter of the next one could have possibly contained. I don't even.

The more I think on this the more I'm convinced the email writer was clearly suffering a moment of insanity.

Personally I couldn't imagine Deadline ending any other way, I remember getting toward the end of the book and practically praying for it to end the way it did.

That being said you'd think an ending such as the book had, would make the reader want to read on, regardless of how long they may have to wait for the next book, not stop reading entirely.

Sometimes humans are so odd.

I thought it ended just fine. Leaves you wishing that Blackout came out oh next week instead of next year. But I could have waited til they were all out (like I did with the Harry Potter books) and read them as one big chunk. Actually I probably will reread the first two books next summer (have a lousy memory for details) before reading Blackout.

The kind of endings I DO hate are from authors who spend 700 pages and only 3 days have elapsed and then in the last chapter, give a synopsis that gives like 6 months worth of things happening.

Shaun would punch this person in the face.

I mean, he would punch a lot of people in the face, but especially this person.

+1

Some people are idiots. Personally I think you suffer them, and fools far better than I would.