Hi all,
I've gotten a lot of e-mails about the impending conclusion of "Daze in the Valley." Most of them want the story to continue or to see if I plan to write a sequel.
It won't and I won't.
In fact, I'm not sure it can. I am a regular reader here on SOL. I enjoy reading the works of others as much as I do compiling my own stories.
That said, I've seen far too many stories keep going far after they should have ended. I have done my best to avoid repetition. In a story the length of "Daze," that's not easy. I have read dozens of stories where plot points are repeated by the same characters over and over again.
I tried to make each description of the character's lives, loves, trials and travails be different from something that was included earlier in the story. I've tried to make the "shoots" as unique as possible and have gone to great lengths to refrain from descriptive scenes that are too closely related to something else in the story.
Sometimes it has worked; other times it hasn't. But the effort was there.
There is nowhere for "Daze" to go without skipping literally years in the character's lives. I'm trying to do that in another story -- a sequel to "The Outsider" -- and it is not working out at all.
So the tale reaches it's proverbial climax as the group's signature motivation -- "Dragon Lore" -- wraps.
The last chapter is an epilogue that catches up to the characters a few months later, after the video is released, to close the couple of plot lines that still needed a resolution.
After that ... finis!
There will be no curtain call.
Regards,
Jay C.