Everyday Canvas

Endings, Friends, and Problems of Our Own Making

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: Every story has an ending. Every ending has a new beginning. As writers, do you agree with this statement?
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Just maybe. I am not sure about every ending, though. Some endings are just that. Endings. Others may open to another beginning, as in serial stories.

Talking about serial stories, I am not a big fan of them. Especially when any episode is left unfinished. I can understand, however, an author leaving a tiny something to the reader’s imagination after really finishing with the main storyline.

What gets me see red are the authors who stop the story in the middle or in an exciting place in the plot, so the reader feels obligated to buy the next book. That is not fiction. That is plain greed. If I have committed my time and feeling for a book, I deserve a wrapped up main plot at the end of it. It doesn’t matter if the following books are given out freely, as Amazon does, sometimes.

It has to be an author’s honor to finish the main storyline at the end of a book. When I read the last page, the book has to feel finished, even if, later on, the author takes the same characters and/or setting and tells another story.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: From Monty ’s "OLD FRIENDS" 
“I wish once more to find the friends that I miss so.”

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I think I miss all my friends, although they may have grown in different ways and if I saw them again, I wonder if we would have the same rapport, for life changes and alienates people.

Still, I do miss my old friends: My best friend in Grade School who wanted to be a jet pilot and she ended up becoming something totally different, my friends in High School who went their own ways each, my friends in college most of whom became High School Lit teachers and a few others who took different paths, my friends in my adult life and my friends in my own family who have settled in different places of the planet, and most of all, my husband who was my best friend and who I miss terribly.

Friendship is a relationship like no other. To me, it means camaraderie and mutual support and understanding. Add to it, fun times we have had together, and why wouldn’t I love to see them, again? I think that would be great, and I would accept the different ways through which each of us might have grown. I would hope they’d accept me, too.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: From Shadow Prowler-Spreading Love ’s "Invalid Item" .
Tell us, do you agree that many people create their own problems?

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Yes, although some problems are unavoidable like the cliché of death and taxes, we tend to create our own problems.

I am guilty of one problem I recently created. Due to the social distancing and isolation concerns of Covid 19, I didn’t use my car. Actually, I probably used it once in 15 or 20 days, and it stayed stuck in the garage. The result: its battery died, after only two years of life. When I called the dealer, the agent told me they were getting the same kind of battery calls several times a day. The result is, I now have a brand-new battery. I could have avoided this by starting the car with the garage door open and letting it run or just by driving it around once in a while.

This, however, is a simple problem which had a solution. There are other more serious problems people create whose solutions may be hard to come by. They may be things like, overlooking the misbehavior of our kids and letting that misbehavior lead on to more serious consequences, not realizing the needs or not deciphering the pain or joy hidden under the words of our friends, not taking care of our own needs, and worrying about little things while we let big stuff pass us by.

Many of our actions and thoughts lead to consequences, which create problems for us. This mostly happens because of our faulty perception of the circumstances and our omitting to see their intrinsic makeup. Thus, we give the situations an undeserved power, and that power steamrolls into problems and misery for us.