What It Feels Like to End a Six-Book Regency Romance Series
Every writer talks about the start of a novel. The blank page, the first line, the thrill of a new world opening up. But few talk about the endings, and yet that may be the harder craft. Recently I typed the last line of a six-book series, and I have been thinking ever since about what that actually means.
The Riddle Sisters has been one of the great pleasures of my writing life. Six books, six sisters, and a mystery threaded through all of them. It was during this process I really got to know them. That was the part I loved most. Each book stands on its own as a sweet and clean Regency romance, with its own courtship and its own happy ending, but underneath all of them a single quiet question kept turning, book to book, until it finally resolved in Veronica’s story.
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I will not say more than that, because half the joy of a series like this is watching the pieces fall into place yourself. What I will say is that building a slow-burn mystery across six romances meant I had to plant things early that would not pay off for years of writing. There were moments, somewhere around book four, when I genuinely worried I had set myself a puzzle I could not solve. Did I bite off too much? Would the romances hold? Bringing it all together in the final book, and having it land the way I always hoped it would, has been deeply satisfying. With each review that came in, I found myself able to breathe a bit more.
And yet. There is the sadness too. I have lived with these sisters for a long time. I knew how each of them took her tea, which one was quickest to laugh, which one was quick to argue back. Closing the door on them for the last time feels less like finishing a job and more like saying goodbye to people I have come to love.
But here is the thing about goodbyes in this work. They are rarely permanent. One of the quiet gifts of being an author is that you can always go back, open an old door, and step into a world you thought you had left behind.
That, perhaps, is the consolation that endings carry inside them. Nothing is truly closed. I am already returning to an old series I left behind years ago, and I will write about that next. If you enjoy reflections on the craft and life of writing romance, follow along.
