That was a question I first asked in this 2013 post.
The answer to that is a great big YES. At least I do. I’ve been thinking about that a lot in recent months for a specific reason. Let me explain.
I just reissued one of my long-ago adventure fantasy novels, The Beasts of Zammar, the fourth book in the Ro-lan series. (Original title: The Demons of Zammar.) Wait, let me rephrase that: the fourth and final book in the Ro-lan series. The series follows the familiar fantasy theme pitting Good (Roland Summers) against Evil (Ras-ek Varano, the Master of Boranga). All four books came out in the early 1980s, meaning that my characters have been around for at least thirty years. But wait, I actually wrote the first book, Master of Boranga, in the ’70s, so the characters in that book have been around even longer.
While each book contains it share of individual adventures, strange encounters and such—standard adventure fantasy fare—the ongoing thread is the desperate quest of Roland and his friends to destroy Ras-ek and his depraved minions, the Holy Ones. Okay, call this stupidity, naiveté or whatever on my part, but in my mind the series was going to continue on indefinitely. So book four did not end the series; it merely offered another cliffhanger.
Not long after that I stopped writing for a while—the need to earn a living got in the way—and when I resumed the creative process I went on to other genres. The majority of my avid fans—all seventeen of them—kept asking me when a fifth book was coming out. What was the final outcome? they wanted to know. Did Ro-lan destroy the Master? How did he do it? Stay tuned, I kept telling them…for over three decades.
The strange thing was, I wanted to know the answer myself. I had no idea how it would end.
So when I began rewriting and reissuing many of my old stories last year, I made the decision to write a new ending to book four. And while doing just that in recent months, I came to realize how attached I was to Roland Summers, Denny McVey, Larra and the rest. These “people” have been swirling around in my brain since the ’70s, and even though I stayed away from writing new adventures for them, in my mind they were still sailing across the deadly sea of the other-dimensional world of Konis in pursuit of Ras-ek. In a weird way it was comforting to think that they were still out there.
But after reconnecting with them while revising the first three books, I decided it was time to let go. So I outlined five new chapters and added them—smoothly, I hope—to the end of what had been The Demons of Zammar. As I wrote those chapters over the past month I experienced an overwhelming range of emotions, including a sense of relief that, one way or another, the story would finally be over, and a great sadness that I would likely never be sailing with Roland and his friends again.
So call me weird…but consider this: a novelist writes a book and, if it is going to be any good at all, becomes part of her characters, identifies with them, pours much of herself into those characters and feels emotionally spent after she writes THE END. It might have taken her six months to write that book, or a year, or even two years. A long time to spend with your creations, right? So how about three decades? Yeah, it took a lot out of me in ending the Ro-lan series with The Beasts of Zammar. But hopefully my characters are relieved.