impossible endings

gah! writing challenge fail AND blog fail!

missed yesterday's post because, simply, it was friday, and i had fun stuff to do. :)
i also wrote only a couple hundred words yesterday, which means i have my work cut out for me today and tomorrow.

my 'drop-dead'line for sending this polished puppy to Agent Almost is the 27th. that will be two months to the day that i got my revision letter. that seems like a reasonable amount of time, and the journalist in me just HAS to work on a deadline, or i'd never get anything done.

NOW, on to the REAL POINT OF THIS POST: ENDINGS

working on my own ending has me thinking about just how difficult it is to satisfy an audience, especially if they've been fans up to the end.

tomorrow, LOST comes to an end, and i have already resigned myself to the fact that i will most likely be disappointed. no matter how genius their story, how cleanly they wrap it up, there is nothing they can do to make me go "wow" at this point.

and here's why:
the best part was the mystery.
the guessing game, the trading theories with other fans, the anticipation, the "aha!" moments that only led to bigger mysteries. the appeal was in the not-knowing.

my book (without giving too much away, and with all modesty and humility) is very much a "will-he-won't-he-and-how" page-turner. once i get to the end and answer those questions, i feel anything i say beyond that will only be disappointing, because the anticipation is over, and that was the fun part.

i like to think of this as Harry Potter Syndrome. there was so much hype and anticipation over the epilogue, it almost didn't matter how JK Rowling ended the actual story. everyone was just dying to know what happened after that. and, inevitably, most folks were disappointed. they wanted to know why their favorite character was left out of the ep.. or just exactly what ron and harry had done to revolutionize the auror system, etc... basically, we wanted an encyclopedia, not an epilogue. (and bless JK, she's giving us one.) but the point is - there is nothing she could have written that would have made all the millions of potter fans say: "ahhh. perfect."

the manuscript i sent to the 4 agents who requested fulls had the wrong ending - the easy ending.
i punted.
as a result, i got one outright 'no' - two 'revise and resubs' that both mentioned the ending - and one Agent Almost, who also nixed the ending but gave me a chance to fix it.

that just puts a girl under more than a little pressure to make it "ahhh perfect."