Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Reverse Cliffhanger Ending

This time, it's the author that's worried about what will happen next!

Well, the good news is that I finished NaNoWriMo 2012, claiming it as my fifth completion. The climactic clash went down without a hitch and my characters found themselves at a happy ending.

The problem? In doing so I accidentally left some very clear hooks for two sequels. Completely separate, distinct ones going in totally different directions. The ending pretty much calls for them in such a way that if people read this novel and I then said there weren't going to be those sequels, they'd be disappointed and possibly mad at me.

One is pretty simple. In the course of the novel, a baby is born. This baby, Oliver, is apparently the center of all of the conflict in the Bridge of Time, because removing him from time will supposedly have a large effect on the future of his world. I haven't ever mentioned how exactly, so this leaves his entire life open with a promise that it will be interesting.

Meanwhile, and much more alarmingly, a couple residents of the other timeline end up falling below the Bridge, and end up in an area I invented a while back for another novel. It's called the Paradox Slip, and it's home to everything that's ever been erased from a universe, whether that's because of time traveling matters or because I, the author, got rid of it. In fact, the place they land in is a setting that I scrapped from a story back when I was like 12 because then I already knew it was stupid.

It follows, then, that every character and story that I've ever chosen not to use or bring back, and everything that fell victim to the time travel trap (which is a surprisingly large amount of stuff in my writing!) is going to be there. This includes a villain in another novel who the heroes were only able to defeat by preventing him from ever being born, and so he's naturally taken control of this world. What I've got on my hands, in effect, is a crossover between everything I have ever written. Ever.

You can see that I'm just a little bit afraid here.

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