by Barb, typing this on our Wickeds retreat at Jessie’s fabulous house in Old Orchard Beach, Maine

So the time has come to talk about the end of the Maine Clambake Mystery series. Back when I tried to envision what it would like to go down this road, I thought this blog post would contain a spoiler. But since almost every single NetGalley, Amazon, and Goodreads review has mentioned that the twelfth book, Torn Asunder, is the last, I don’t think this is really a spoiler.

I didn’t pre-announce Torn Asunder as the last, though the Wickeds, my family, and close personal friends knew. I didn’t think I should say it was the end. I wondered if that would convince people not to buy the book or even not to start the series with another book.

I can see why people included the information it was the last in their reviews. It isn’t in any serious sense a spoiler. It doesn’t give away the solution to the mystery. But back in November, when reviews first started appearing on NetGalley and Goodreads, I wasn’t prepared to deal with the issue. When people asked outright on social media if Torn Asunder was the last, I bobbed and weaved, or didn’t answer at all.

I did address the end of the series in the Acknowledgements of the book but I’m going to answer some of the questions I have been asked since here.

Why did you decide to end the series? Did you run out of stories to tell about Busman’s Harbor? Or, were you bored with Busman’s Harbor?

I think, honestly, I could have made up stories about Julia Snowden and friends for years to come. The reasons I ended the series were personal, business, and creative.

The personal reason is the deadlines were getting to me, affecting my life and my health, not in a good way, and causing me to miss out on things I no longer wanted to miss. I know there are authors (more than one on this very blog) who can write many more books in a year than the one-book-and-one novella that were killing me. I used to think I could be better and faster if I just pulled myself together and applied more discipline. But then I turned seventy and adopted an approach to life I call “radical self-acceptance,” or the Popeye Philosophy, “I yam what I yam.” I decided to abandon my sixty-plus year project of trying to be a better or different person.

I write slowly. I read slowly. I need that frisson of fear of an approaching deadline to get the job done. In other words, my work ethic is that of a college sophomore. I was always going to write to deadline and the deadlines were always going to be tough.

I’m also pretty single-threaded. As a busy mother and boss, I multitasked, but it’s not my default approach. I prefer to be focused and immersed. There are projects beyond fiction-writing I want to tackle. Lots of people could do both, and more, but now I accept that I won’t.

This is who I am. The question was, what was I going to do about it?

The business reason was that the Maine Clambake Mysteries are what they are–mass market paperback and thoroughly mid-list. They were never going to be anything else. While entertaining a smallish number of people has been, in fact, very satisfying, there was no point in pretending I was doing anything different or that it was going to change.

Finally, there is the creative dimension. I am a completer. I have many flaws (see above) but I finish stuff. There is no string of abandoned projects in my life (even ones I probably should have). I like endings, full arcs, drawing a line under things. For me, fiction writing has always been about control. I worked on teams all by life and loved it. There is nothing more exhilarating than working with a group of people toward a common purpose. But I wanted writing to be something I did on my own. Writers often say, “My characters take over and do what they want.” To which I always say, “I have enough people in my life who don’t do what I think they should. That is not what I need from people in a world I am creating.” I wanted to end the series on my own terms. I wanted to finish Julia’s personal arc and leave her the place both she and I wanted her to be. Taking control of the ending was the only way I could do that.

What are you working on now? What will you write next? Will you publish again?

I’ve retired twice before and it’s my belief everyone who has ever retired, been laid-off, or quit a job has a list of things they have long wanted to do when they weren’t working. When my company, WebCT, was sold there was a constant joke among the former employees about how clean our closets, attics, basements, and garages were. In my experience, it takes six months to a year to recover and be ready for the new to flow in, depending on how intense the work was and how exhausted you were when it ended.

In examining my life, I find it breaks nicely into 10 to 12 year chunks. I worked for twelve years at Information Mapping, a company that offers a methodology for analyzing, organizing, and presenting complex written information. I was hired as a freelance writer and ended up at one time or another running every division and department in the organization except finance. But then it was time for me to go. The discipline for thinking that Information Mapping instilled in me is an immutable part of my character and I still have tremendous affection for almost everyone I worked with. After I left, I wrote the early drafts of my first book, The Death of an Ambitious Woman. Similarly, for ten years, I was at WebCT, a company that with several others pioneered putting both distance and traditional classes on the internet. Again, it was a fantastic experience which I still cherish along with the people I worked with. Afterward I dug out the Death of an Ambitious Woman manuscript, rewrote it and had it accepted for publication. I became one of the co-editors of the Best New England Crime Story series. Each ending, each hiatus has resulted in something better coming after.

I wrote the Maine Clambake Mysteries, twelve books and six novellas, for twelve years. I don’t know what comes next. I know that it may not be better than what came before. I do have a few ideas, but they are complex, requiring a lot of research and time, and I’m not sure if I’ll actually write any of them. Plus, having been a mid-list writer, there is no guarantee I’ll get published again. It may even make it harder. So we’ll see is the answer.

(Spoilers ahead) Do you regret breaking up Julia and Chris?

No. Chris was never going to be right for Julia, which I feel badly about because I made him that way. However, if I’d known I would end at twelve books, I would have broken them up sooner to give Julia and Tom’s relationship more time to develop.

Is there anything you would have changed in the first book if you had known the series would go to twelve?

I don’t think so, though I certainly would have written that first book better if I had the experience I have after writing twelve.

Who is your favorite character to write?

Gus and Mrs. Gus, Fee and Vee Snugg. It’s so freeing to write secondary characters.

Is there a character whose arc became a pain?

Not really. I really enjoyed writing Quentin Tupper, but unlike all the other regulars he is a summer resident. Sliding Quentin in and out of the series was a bit of challenge.

The other was Le Roi the Maine Coon cat. I hadn’t intended to have a cat, but when I saw what life was like for a cat on the real Cabbage Island, I had to include one. However, Le Roi was always in town when my characters were on the island or on the island when my characters were in town. Keeping track of his whereabouts and making sure there was someone available to feed him was a real pain.

Who’s a character you should have killed off?

No one. Julia’s brother-in-law, Sonny, was designed in the series proposal to be the antagonist. Some people who didn’t make it to the turn about three-quarters of the way through the first book, Clammed Up, gave up on the book due to too much family conflict. But I wouldn’t kill Sonny. His wife and kids would suffer too much and he and Julia both grow and change each other, however minimally, which was satisfying to write.

Who’s a character who should have been spun off?

Kensington approached my agent, casually, about a spinoff featuring Fee and Vee Snugg. I didn’t want to write another series in the Busman’s Harbor world, so I never followed up.

Finally, at the end of the world’s longest blog post, for the superfans of the Wickeds and the Maine Clambake Mysteries still with me, I want to thank the readers. As I say in the Torn Asunder Acknowledgements, you have been a joy of my life. You have given me this opportunity and the community that has gone with it.

The many, many emails and social media comments I have received since Torn Asunder was published have been lovely and 100% supportive. Many have expressed satisfaction that the series actually resolved and they knew what happened to the characters. I can’t express how much I have appreciated these notes.

With tremendous gratitude. Barb

Readers: How do you feel about series ending? Do they run their course or should they go on as long as the author lives?