Ever since the ‘Final Part’ of my tale about my parallel teenage romances, I have had thousands of angry complainants, of one gender in particular, telling me they were going to unceremoniously deblog me if I didn’t come up with a proper ending for this tale. If I were a writer for Mills & Boon, they said, I would have been sacked forthwith for such an anticlimax, even under my failsafe nom de plume of Tourmayne Brierley. This is exactly the same thing that happened to Charles Dickens, you know, when he first serialised Great Expectations. Public pressure forced him into that sucky happy ending between Pip and Estella, when he intended to make it as miserable as it should have been. I mean, look at this for a copout:
"I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."
Oh, come on, Charles, it's very pretty, but where's your professional integrity? But to return to the point....
Everything is true in the first paragraph, except for the bits about the thousands of angry readers, as there was only one. She is, it has to be said, a highly significant reader, who controls my medications and sticks me with needles twice a day, so I will get down to it right away, with deepest apologies for any disappointment on behalf of the 131 page viewers who have been following this tale since yesterday. She asks,
‘OK...so that ending is unsatisfactory from my 'girl' point of view! Which of the two did you break up with first... What did you tell them when you broke it off... Did they ever find out about each other... ???’
The above questions make certain assumptions that are not valid, so let me answer this in my own way. I will just say at this point that I had no intention of hiding any facts; all this would have been revealed in my own good time when I discussed heading off to Teacher’s College, but I see there is pressure here for closure that must be dealt with right away.
Unlike Dickens, however, I will not bow to public opinion and produce a happy ending just to please sentimental Mills & Boon readers. If there is one, it won’t be on that account. Nor, if I ever write for Mills & Boon, will my penname be anything but Tourmayne Brierley, which I think suits perfectly. But I do promise you, if I write fiction for Mills & Boon, it will be considerably more racy than my teenage love life. I’ll get Falconhurst and slaves in there somewhere.
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