Wednesday, July 14, 2010

BloggeRhythms 7/14/2010

They say that no news is good news, and I guess that’s really true unless you’re trying to write a blog entry and staring at blank pages. But, in fact, there really isn’t anything happening that’s worth typing-time at the moment. Just more of the same old, same old.

The news aside though, I got a compliment from a reader yesterday that really pleased me more than most. A young lady who liked my first book, Hot Cole, just finished the second, Cole Calling. She’s spoken to me about her progress as she read along and told me for some time now that she‘d liked the first book, and felt the second even better, really enjoying them both. When I spoke to her last week, she had only four pages left to read.

Now that she’s finished the story, she told me the ending really surprised her. Reading those last four pages had her wondering what was going to happen to Bobby Cole, the hero. When she found out, she said she was shocked.

From my perspective, as an author, her reaction was the best I could hope for. A reader who really cares about the story and characters and is glad to have read the book. It doesn’t get better than that.

It’s said that most who read novels decide in the first few words whether to keep reading or not. And if the beginning doesn’t "hook” them, they’ll simply move on to something else. As a reader myself, although I agree with that premise in general, for authors I like, I’ll try a few more pages before I finally decide.

The endings though are something else entirely, as far as I’m concerned. My biggest complaint about popular novelists is when they either run out of ideas or become so creative that really good stories end with some kind of ridiculous happening. And in those cases I feel, as a reader, I’ve been taken in up front only to be disappointed at the end, having invested my time to later find out that something impossible, improbable or inane takes place…letting me down with a thud.

In fact, that’s how I became a fiction author. When I complained to a friend who teaches creative writing about how disappointed some convoluted, unreal endings made me feel, she challenged me to do better or keep quiet. More or less -put up or shut up. So, that’s what I did, and now I’m a novelist.

But, the best part is, that what made me accept the challenge of writing novels in the first place, creating believable, satisfying endings has been met. The bad news is, now I’ve got go out and do it again in my new book, It’s Cole Outside, because it isn’t easy.

The funny thing though is that, apparently, endings have been an important part of my whole business life. Because, while writing this entry it occurred to that I spent forty years in the commercial financing field and even wrote a book about the subject, Selling Equipment Leasing. But now that I’m no longer active, it seems the whole industry’s gone down the proverbial chute worldwide. And that’ leads me to believe that if I’d stayed around longer, perhaps we might not have seen that business end the disastrous way it did.

That’s it for today folks.

Adios

1 comment:

  1. I liked your books' endings too, Mike. What can I say? You're a closer!

    ReplyDelete