The interview I did in Second Life (with Adele Ward on Meet an Author) has been posted at treet.tv. Here’s the link. You’ll need Quicktime to view it, and maybe a little patience (could be me, my internet connection has been slow). It’s about an hour long.
I don’t like to hear the sound of my own voice, so I probably won’t be going back to listen to the interview (having said that, I’ve just been told that I need to take a look because, apparently, I’m…really animated…whatever that means), although I do remember being asked what it feels like to end a series (jeez, now that I think about it, I hope the question wasn’t what it feels like to end a book, because boy, I got that wrong). What I said, more or less, was that I didn’t know what that felt like. Yet. But that I thought it would be quite painful.
Or not. Lynn Viehl, over at Genreality, writes about what it feels like to end her StarDoc series:
“Oh, yes. Sitting here, head throbbing, voice almost gone, and so tired I could just collapse and sleep wherever I drop for three days, I’ve still arrived at pretty incredible destination. Finishing a story, even one as long as mine, isn’t about typing “the end” once and for all. It’s about you, who you are, and what you can do. No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles you encounter on the journey, when you reach your goal you don’t just cross a finish line. You prevail. You beat everyone and everything that tried to stop you along the way. You’re no longer attempting do something, you’ve done it.
That isn’t just finishing or ending. That’s triumph, and that’s yours, and that’s forever. And when you look around, you won’t see any of those obstacles or troubles or heartaches you ran into on the way. They can’t be where you are. They can’t do what you’ve done.
As long as I’ve been working on it, I thought I would feel miserable to end my story. I really expected that typing “forever” would have me busting out in tears. Instead, I felt a moment of overwhelming satisfaction – the kind you can’t fake – and then a sense of peace.”
That’s how I feel every time I finish writing a novel, a short story—anything, really—and I hope, when it’s time to wrap up the body of an entire series, that I also feel that same sense of satisfaction and peace.