It’s 9 degrees outside (-16 with windchill). The kitchen pipe froze so I have a space heater aimed at the pipes. A few drops are starting to drip out of the faucet. Fingers crossed.

They’re saying that this could break records for cold, but they’re always saying things like that. It’s just a very cold day.

I’ve sent my new novel, Gods Fare No Better, to about fifteen people, and the feedback is beginning to trickle in. It’s a long book (today I plan on putting it into a PDF to get an actual page count), so I don’t expect many people to finish it, but I’m grateful for those who do.

So far everyone likes the book in a way that strikes me as sincere. The praise has been of the “no dude, seriously” variety, which makes me excited to show the whole book to the world.

However, there is unanimous concern about the end of it, to the point that I spent all day yesterday adding about four thousand words to it. The concerns are as follows: there’s a big, fifty-or-so page chunk of interlude that happens right before the final boss fight. Readers felt that this really blew the pacing of the book. While they liked the interlude, it felt difficult to get back into it. Then, the actual final fight wasn’t satisfying at all.

This is why feedback is so important. I’ll tell you how I fixed it, but first I want to talk about endings in general. The fact is I’ve never known how to pull them off. In BTTWL I opted for a mysterious, surreal ending that pissed a lot of people off. In LDDRE I also left it open-ended, though with a major character death that felt like an end. Black Gum ended with a hallucination.

And so on. You see the trend.

A part of me really enjoys weird endings, but I had never given much thought into what makes weird endings satisfying. It’s not just the weirdness itself, and it certainly isn’t that open-ended “well, several things could happen” feeling you get sometimes. No, successful weird endings are always accompanied by an equal amount of “wrapping up.”

Take No Country for Old Men, which I was aping in LDDRE. People remember the sudden death of Llewelyn, Chigurh stumbling down the road with a broken arm, and the sheriff talking about his dream. All of this works, however, because in the book and film there is a climax about halfway through the movie. Everything leads up to that tense shootout/escape at the hotel, and the rest of it is fallout.

Think about if that scene had never occurred. You don’t get any confrontation between Llewelyn and Chigurh at all. That would have really upset some folks! Instead we have a chiasm structure, where the events of the first half are mirrored in the second, with an intense catastrophic event right in the middle. (“Half” is a loose term here, might be better to go with “act” or “section.”)

In my previous books, the stories led to something that never occurred. I was under the mistaken impression that it was the subversion that made my favorite stories cool, without really thinking about how that subversion was carried out in a way that felt satisfying to me as the reader/audience.

Talking about endings leads me to think about beginnings, particularly this new beginning of mine as a novelist, again. I don’t think what I was doing as a young man could accurately be described as “novelisting,” more like “artisting.” I was playing with color and language and vibe, and it led to some results I’m proud of, others not so much.

I had no interest in the form of the novel, however, or even storytelling. When I decided to start writing again, it was with the intention of becoming a student of the craft, and building up a skillset that would allow me to write good books. I still want to get weird ideas out there, but I want the framework to be solid, and the experience to be entertaining.

So here’s how I fixed the ending to my new novel: I set the first phase of the fight before the interlude. I let the good guys win the first round, then get wrecked the second. After everyone is all beaten and bloody, it feels more appropriate to pause there. See what I mean? Instead of building up hype, building up hype, then BOOM cutting away from that hype to digress, you allow the hype to swell into an actual payoff (however bad it might be for the heroes).

It feels more appropriate to do it that way. Then I beefed up the back end of the battle, fleshing out different character arcs and giving them each a chance to shine and have some internality.

Everything’s fixable once you know what the problem is.