It’s something that as a writer I’ve thought about many a times: When does a story end?

It may seem very obvious: When its done, of course.

There are plenty of examples of “done in one” stories out there.  Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs had nowhere else to go following its bloody conclusion.

But there have been other successful films/books which have featured head scratching sequels or, if you will, continuations of the original story.  Take the original The Poseidon Adventure.  That film featured what appeared to be a hermetically sealed story and, like Reservoir Dogs, didn’t appear to have anything else to offer, storywise.

Yet that didn’t stop producer Irwin Allen from coming up with a sequel, albeit with a whole new, and very familiar, cast…

Then there are the “series” of stories featuring a prominent protagonist (or group of protagonists).  Author Sir Conan Arthur Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes…

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a series of novels featuring the characters of Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars…

In the early pulp era, you had the monthly adventures of Doc Savage and The Shadow.  Their stories would continue until the pulp era reached its end in the late 1940’s, though it wasn’t until more recent years that people have written stories wherein the two meet.

These pulp heroes, among many others, ushered in the era of the comic book superhero, and stories featuring the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, etc. etc. have been around for many decades and are still delighting fans…

Of course I’m only scratching the surface here.  I haven’t even mentioned Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe books or Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane or Herge’s Tin Tin graphic novels or Ian Fleming’s James Bond books or Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventures or the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew etc. etc. etc.

When creating a genuinely interesting character in a interesting -and hopefully successful!- story, I suspect every author is tempted to follow up with further stories/adventures regarding that character.

But sometimes the continuations tire audiences out.  That initial spark fades and, with it, interest in the continuing adventures of said character.

I point all this out because I noticed today Amazon.com is offering a genuinely good deal for Justified: The Complete Series in both BluRay and DVD formats…

During the first two of the six seasons of the show I absolutely loved it.  Season 2 featured the incredibly villainous -yet also strangely pathetic and sympathetic- Mags Bennett and proved the series’ highlight season, IMHO.  Seasons 3 through 5, while good, never quite reached the high of season 2.  By season 5, it felt like the stories were repeating themselves.

When season 6 originally aired, I recorded it to my DVR but after many months of sitting there, I ultimately deleted them. Though there remained a bit of curiosity within me to see where the show would end (the makers of the series knew that season would be its last), I had simply lost interest in seeing the show to such a degree that I couldn’t (ahem) justify spending all those hours watching this conclusion.

It is possible I change my mind.  The final season is available to be seen for free through Amazon Prime, but, again, something I loved had overstayed its welcome.

Sadly, the same happened with many other once popular shows and books.  I loved the early Dirk Pitt novels by Clive Cussler but can’t stomach them anymore.  The X-Files was one of my all time favorite shows but somewhere around the 4th season the spark was gone (though I admit I did watch the new very short series.  Unfortunately, only two of the episodes within it were great, the rest were only OK).  I remember laughing until tears flowed down my face during some of the early Simpsons years.  Now I can’t understand how it remains on the air.

Which in a very, very long-winded way brings me to my Corrosive Knights series.

Some of the prominent characters in the series are near and very dear to me.  I came up with several of them many years before formally writing this series and, in my younger mind, I figured I could write stories about them until the day I died.

But as the years passed and I worked on each individual book, there came a realization that was very much learned by what I wrote above: Sometimes the best stories are the ones that focus on one large tale and wrap up before overstaying their welcome.  These stories don’t wander or repeat themselves (at least not too much) nor do they -hopefully!- ever elicit in readers a sense of “been there, done that”.

That’s not to say when I’ve concluded the Corrosive Knights series (the series will run to eight books) there will be no chance at all for future tales involving some of these characters.

It is my hope that when the eight books are written, people will appreciate that I’ve given these stories and stories-within-stories my all and that together the series will form a larger, intriguing whole.  And after all these years of writing these books comes the realization that I’m getting very close to the finish line.

It is very much my intention to end it with a blast.

To those who have bought the books and offered their kind comments regarding the series: A heartfelt thank you.

We’re not done yet, but all the pieces are coming together!