Memo
Wednesday, May 8th, 1999
To: Devoted readers of the "Angela" Series
Re: A Long December and the end of the "Angela" Series

1. I have received several emails from online readers of the story who liked it just fine in it's current state and had no bad things to say regarding the story or the ending of the series. I, along with the online readers, are, I suspect, actually less attached to the ongoing saga as are those who know me personally.

2. I recently watched Great Expectations on PBS. I thought it was quite good, though it was a bit confusing because I had not read the book. Nonetheless, there was one interesting thing about the story: It had a very ambiguous ending. It was later commented on by the host of the show that, indeed, this was Dickens' intention. His first ending for the story was where Pip and Estella meet again when they are much older and have gotten over each other, or as least learned to cope without the other's presence. One of Dickens' friends told him that the public would not like that ending; they would prefer a happy ending, which is how most of Dickens' stories ended. Dickens took this advice to heart, but he would not compromise the rest of the story, so he wrote the ending ambiguously, leaving it up to the reader. The problem with ambiguous endings is that it never quite satisfies because you are still unsure of the author's original intent for the ending. But perhaps you would not have enjoyed the author's original intent in the first place, as with Great Expectations.

Quite frankly, as the author, I don't want a nice, neat ending with lots of closure. To me, that is extremely unrealistic and goes against what I'm trying to achieve when I write, which is realism. I want my characters to be as real as I can, making them so that the reader can relate to them and enjoy the story. A perfect ending is not real. Life rarely, if ever, works that way. Things don't tie up in a nice little package that you can mail home to your parents at Christmas time. The Angela/Jack saga could continue on forever, but then it loses its point. In ending it this way, the intent is that, although you don't have full closure, the characters have come full circle, and you ought to be confident in the fact that they will be able to make it now. It's just like Ordinary People. The ending didn't have perfect closure, but it came full circle and you knew that Con was going to okay.

3. And finally, before I concluded the above, I tried several times to begin a new story. My attempts sucked hosewater. I don't want to write another; it's excessive. There is no more to say. Period. This is not to say that I will cease to ever write about Jack and Angela and Johnny and Frankie ever again, because I doubt that. However, the is the end of the "Angela" Series, which deals with Angela and Jack's relationship. The relationship has come full circle; nothing more is necessary.