Separation Anxiety: Clarifying the Previous Post

From the comments on my previous post, The End of Imagination, it seemed that my meaning was not entirely clear.  So I wanted to clarify the post.

In my thinking, the post wasn't about an end to imagination as in writer's block.  It wasn't even so much an emotional or psychological ending.  After reading Lawrence Block's story "The Burglar's Future," wherein the author laments how old age means he can't write any more stories in the series, it got me thinking about how inevitably all authors have to let go of their characters.  In cases like Block's or his friend and sometimes co-author Donald Westlake's it was a physical reason.  They got old and in Westlake's case, he died, and thus could no longer continue their series.  I probably should also have mentioned Terry Pratchett, who had to stop writing the Discworld series when his Alzheimer's got too bad and shortly after that he passed away, leaving the Discworld at an end.

Sometimes a publisher will try to continue a series with another author.  Some like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew it works better because the original author was working under another name and so it was probably hard to tell when the torch might have been passed--or  how many times.  Others like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you wish they hadn't bothered.

I probably muddied the waters in my last post by talking about my series that ended.  It is my blog, so I usually feel like I should chime in with my personal perspective.  The end of my series were not really a physical issue.  I mean, I didn't quit because I was old or sick or dead.  I stopped the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series and the Chances Are series because I felt I had everything at a satisfactory end.  That was an emotional reason instead of a physical one.  And certainly you couldn't say I ran out of imagination or I had writer's block, because I have thought of ways to continue those; I just never feel any real need to do so.

Besides the physical reasons or the emotional reasons there's also another reason to quit a series:  the retail reason.  Some books like Justice for All or Army of the Damned or The Lipstick Lesbian Elixir just didn't sell enough copies for me to spend time and energy on a sequel.  If I so chose I could probably think of something, but who would buy it?  You see that a lot more in comic books or movies (and comic book movies) where a series gets cancelled because of low sales.

I likened this phenomenon to a couple of songs about how a child grows up and leaves his imaginary friends behind.  This is I suppose both a physical and emotional reason.  The child grows up physically and (hopefully) matures emotionally and breaks contact with his imaginary friends.  So maybe that muddied the waters as well.

The point is that at some point all authors inevitably have to say goodbye to their imaginary friends--their characters.  In some cases it's because the author gets old or sick and then dies.  Or in other cases it's simply that the author decides to move on to something else either for emotional reasons--feeling they have taken the story and characters as far as they need to go--or retail reasons--the series isn't selling enough books to remain a profitable venture.

So now, is that clear as mud?