Keeping Promises to the Reader

I’m in the final chapters of the first draft of Saint Arcology, a science fiction novel set in Mumbai involving a progressive pope, a Vatican plot, genetically engineered mollusks, a society of radicalized scientists, a blasphemous augmented reality game, a fake guru, and a solution to global poverty.

The main plot climax has already occurred, but I’m not the kind of author than can just fade to black. I feel as if I’ve made promises to potential readers of this story. My checklist for wrapping up a novel includes the following:

• Checking in with each main character and many of the minor/secondary characters. Where did the end up? How did the events of the story change them?
• Addressing any mysteries I set up earlier in the book. Not every question needs to be answered explicitly, but the reader should at least have a sense that I didn’t completely forget about an open thread.
• Some cliffhangers re: the events of the world are fine (fodder for the next possible book), but the main characters’ emotional arcs should have some kind of resolution. The exception would be a series that is really a single story divided into multiple books (like LoTR or GoT) but Saint Arcology isn’t that kind of book.

I think I succeeded in doing that for every book in the Reclaimed Earth series. If and when you read Book 3, The Last Crucible (Sep. 21 Flame Tree Press), you can let me know if you agree. For this current novel, I won’t have a good sense of “resolution completeness” until I reread it from start to finish. I’ll still miss a few things, but that’s what first readers are for. “What about so-and-so, what happened with them?”

When writers break their promises, it’s a real letdown. Most Game of Thrones readers feel at least some sense of betrayal re: the massive delay in the series. Even if GRRM manages to finally write an ending, most readers will have long forgotten many of the threads and questions he set up earlier in the books. For that matter, he’s probably forgotten most of them at this point. Delays create more delays. Once an author allows the brainspace for a particular world to be overwritten by other materials, it’s an effortful process to reload those characters and setting details. I hope he manages to pull it off (and if he does, I may reread the earlier books to refresh my own memory).

Please wish me luck in my final first draft push. If you’d like to support me as an author, please consider pre-ordering The Last Crucible, or starting with The Sky Woman if you haven’t yet begun the series.

Thank you, and good health to you.