What Happens After “The End”? The Story Doesn’t Really Stop

There is this idea that when an author types The End, there is some sort of closing. You finish the manuscript, shut the laptop, celebrate what you accomplished, and eventually move on to the next thing. I don’t think I ever really experienced that with Moons and Shadows. If anything, finishing the Foundational Book made me want to crawl further inside it.

You know those videos where someone opens a book, puts their feet against the pages, and pretends they’re stepping into the story? That was me. I wanted to buy a ticket to Starlight Beach, find myself a table at the North Star, order something warm, and stay there. I wanted to quietly write near the beach and spend more time with all of these people I had gotten to know so well. I didn’t feel ready to leave them because, in a strange way, I hadn’t.

The reality was much less picturesque. I finished the school year exhausted. By the time July arrived, my brain was done. I slept - a lot. I wrote in pockets when my brain allowed it, but mostly I finally let myself come down from what had been an incredibly long creative push.

The Foundational Book wasn’t something that appeared in my life two years ago. In many ways, I’ve been carrying pieces of it for two decades. About ten years ago, I started noticing things more intentionally - words, ideas, strange little pieces that would populate in my mind. I would write them down even though I didn’t understand yet what they belonged to. Then, over the last two years, something changed. The story began falling out of me so incessantly that writing became less about trying to invent something and more about trying to keep up with what was arriving.

By the time the Foundational Book was finished, my brain was tired. And “foundational” has always meant something larger to me than simply this is the first book in the Shadow Bound Series. This story is laying groundwork that reaches far beyond one book and even beyond one series. There are pieces I understand completely, pieces I’ve only been graciously handed in fragments, and characters who seem perfectly content to tell me just enough to keep me following them.

That is part of why I’ve been meaning to sit down and listen to the Special Edition audiobook all the way through again, and also why I keep putting it off. I know myself. I’ll make it three pages before somebody says something and my brain explodes with connections. Suddenly I’m writing notes, following a backstory, questioning something I wrote two years ago, and disappearing down a rabbit hole I didn’t know existed.

Hearing the characters changes things for me, too. After spending this much time with them, I can hear them talking. The audiobook gave voices to people who had lived inside my head for years, and I am incredibly grateful for what that experience became. I’m continually humbled by the story God has given me and by the people who helped bring another dimension of it to life.

I think readers can experience something similar when they move from the physical book to the audiobook. Moons and Shadows introduces you to a lot of people. I knew that when I wrote it, and the way those characters enter the story is purposeful. But it wasn’t until I was reading The Heartless Hunter that I had this funny moment of realizing, Oh. I really did introduce my readers to a lot of people.

The audiobook gives you another way to know them. A voice separates one personality from another. Cadence matters. Humor lands differently. Emotion beneath a sentence becomes audible. Suddenly, the people you met on the page may feel a little more like people you’ve actually spent time with.

Meanwhile, I’m still spending time with them every day because Book 2 means they never actually left.

Daxler has absolutely interrupted breakfast with an opinion nobody asked for. I can practically hear him looking at something perfectly ordinary on my plate and deciding it represents a catastrophic failure of culinary judgment. Ashla is just as likely to appear metaphorically upside down somewhere in my head and offer an observation such as, “Perhaps endings are simply beginnings wearing their coats backward.” Then I’m left standing there thinking, Well. Okay, Ashla.

That’s what happens after The End, at least for me. The characters don’t disappear. The world doesn’t close. If anything, the door opens wider.

I’m still living with these people. I’m still learning things about them. I’m still finding pieces of the world I didn’t know were there. And while you’re returning to Starlight Beach through the audiobook, I’m already there, following them into what comes next.