I’ve said before that as writers, we always seem to be living simultaneously in the past and in the future. Writing and publishing is a pipeline, and we do not move through it on a linear path. At the same time I’m cultivating the new seeds of other stories, I’m halfway through drafting another, and seeing yet another hit bookstores. For me, this trilogy is already in the past. It’s a frozen frame in a life that has kept hurtling forward. Already it’s started to feel hazy and indistinct, a thing slipping into the background.
For readers, however, the final part of the journey is just beginning. And that means the trilogy isn’t really over. Stories are a collaboration between authors and readers. There are always gaps for readers to fill, things to interpret, different things that different people like or dislike. It often feels to me like books don’t really exist until someone else has read them, has met the characters I’ve sketched out on the page, has lived in the world I’ve painstakingly built. Before that, it’s a home with the furniture laid out, but no visitors or occupants except me.
How can I know it is real until I am not the only one experiencing it?
So, here it is. The end. The final installment. I say I am happy with how it turned out, how I ended things, but I am already in the midst of the next book, thinking hard about how to make it better. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll take a day to stop, to reminisce, to flip through the pages, sink into the world, and remember I wrote that.
This is how I like to think of the characters now—looking out over a vast landscape, a beloved friend at their side, contemplating new adventures.
