…Well, for the sake of this post, I’m going to assume that we all have these moments and just continue on.

So you’ve read this absolutely amazing book or you’ve just finished an epic, 7 book, trumpets and heroic sacrifices fantasy epic masterpieceopus, right?

So you’ve finally reached the end and this mood settles over you.

You’re a little sad that it’s over. You feel a little bit lost, maybe feeling suddenly purpose-less.

It’s okay, I understand.

It happens to all of us.

But here’s the thing. We get to that point, after we’ve just broken off a long-term relationship we’ve been having with a book and we still feel like reading.

You don’t want to immediately jump into another long term relationship. That’s just badnewsbears for everyone all around. It’s bad for you because you’re definitely NOT ready for another commitment quite yet and it’s bad for the book you choose to try and tackle because, let’s be honest here, they deserve better from us to be the rebound book, you know?

So what do you do?

You pick up some Pringles books.

And no, I’m not talking about books about the origins and history of Pringles chips (though Tami has a joke to share about that topic *nudgenudge).

Do you know what the original slogan for Pringles was?

“Once you pop, you just can’t stop.”

To me, Pringles books are the ones I read in between the heavy hitters, the ones looking for me to get down on one knee and offer up a diamond ring by the time we get to chapter 2.

Pringles books are spontaneous and flirty. They’re okay with the lack of commitment and they just want to have a bit of fun.

Pringles books are those stories that you KNOW won’t blow your mind. They’re light-hearted, easy to read and they don’t ask much of you. They know that they won’t be the one you chase for the rest of your life and they’re okay with that, so long as they’re able to spend some time with you.

In short?

Pringles books are palate cleansers, the sort of FUN read that you go through to refresh yourself after a monster of a story.

Currently (at the time of writing this post), my Pringles books was the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. It’s not all that deep and the character interactions…kind of remind me of a daytime soap opera (in space!)? At the same time, it’s just this nice, easy on the brain-power, rollicking space adventure and that’s just what I needed after pushing through the book I was reading before.

But we all have them.

More importantly, we’ve all NEEDED them at one point or another.

So in recent memory, what sort of Pringles books have you gone through?

Don’t worry. I’ll wait. 

So I recently had the opportunity to re-watch the movie 1408. What had happened was, I recommended the movie to a friend of mine who was hoping for a scary movie to watch but was dissatisfied with the recent trend of horror movies just turning into these giant, gore-fests and devolving into torture-porn. He wanted something a little different.

Why did I push for 1408?

It was based on a Stephen King short story and say what you will about the man, he knows how to write creepy. The other reason was that I felt the movie did a surprisingly good job of it. There’s only a little bit of blood in the movie and it primarily relies on a sense of ‘wrongness’ to the environment to scare the pants off you.

That and it was a haunted hotel room story.

You can never go wrong with a good haunted hotel room story.

Suffice to say, I loved the movie. I thought it had a good (if simple) story and built up the atmosphere nicely as well as dropping along a few scares here and there at a nice and even pace.

The crowning jewel of the movie though? Definitely the ending. As good as the movie was, this was one of those cases where the ending really just shed a light on everything that had happened before, during the course of the movie, and essentially almost redefines what happened.

And I lent the DVD copy I had of the movie to a friend.

Now I’d bought the movie because I wanted it around but I hadn’t actually watched my copy of it yet, you know? I’d just bought the damned thing to add to my collection for later watching.

What I didn’t notice was that I had bought the DVD with the director’s cut ending.

I only found out about it when my friend brought back my movie, telling me that it was pretty good, but that the ending ruined it.

I couldn’t believe it. I defended the ending, wholeheartedly I defended it! I told him how amazing it was, and what a poignant feel it left the story on. I told him how that thrilling moment of revelation sent chills down my spine when you hear the girl’s voice coming through right at the end when the wife is there…

This is when he interrupted me.

“What the hell movie are you talking about?”

And so I stopped mid-rant.

“What the hell movie are YOU talking about?”

It turns out there were two endings.

The theatrical ending and the director’s cut alternate ending.

If you haven’t seen this movie, I VERY highly recommend that you take a watch of the theatrical version first.

So here’s the thing. They have this wonderful story, tightly paced with a classic setup and a good buildup of atmosphere…and then to top it all off, you throw in this powerful, poignant ending that affirms that John Cusack’s character went through everything he did. And it pushes that revelation in a wonderfully subtle way–through the daughter’s voice coming out of the burnt tape recorder. Throw in the wife’s reaction to it when she clearly believed her estranged husband was out of his mind and that blank, neutral expression on Cusack’s face as he looks at her reaction? Not gloating, not happy and not sad. Just blank. It was totally this “believe me now?” kind of face but without any snarky or any ‘I told you so’ feel to it.

It was fantastic. The perfect way to end the film.

Then you have the director’s cut ending. His “original” vision of the ending, if you would.

In this one, Cusack dies in the fire. The estranged wife attends his funeral, to be accosted by a HAMMY Samual L Jackson who goes on and on about how Cusack dying was a good thing because he averted a great evil or some such nonsense.

Understandably, she completely blows him off. In this ending, Jackson is the one listening to the burnt recorder, alone in his car and then there’s this completely inappropriate jump scare with Cusack’s burnt face in the rearview mirror and Jackson doing this exaggerated jumpy motion before the image disappears and he drives off. Then you see the burnt out ruins of room 1408 and a ghostly image of Cusack and his kid as they fade away into the sunlight.

WHY?

That makes no sense whatsoever. How can you take a movie with all of this build-up and then completely reduce it to this last cheesy scare tactic?

What’s worse is that the ending nullifies the build-up of the movie. The wife gets no sense of closure whatsoever, Cusack’s character never really changes as he doesn’t have to live with the knowledge of what happened. For all intents and purposes, in the director’s cut, Cusack’s character died crazy and that’s just…a damned waste.

Endings are important. Endings are damned important. A good ending  can reinforce an average story. Because it’s the last thing you see before you’re done with the movie, a good ending is usually the thing audiences take away with them when they’re done.

And a bad ending? Just the opposite. A bad ending can RUIN all of the build-up, atmosphere and character building you’ve done. An ending that doesn’t quite fit the tone of what the rest of the story is about can completely skew what your audience takes away from your story as they walk away from your story.

So the ending? Super important. It’s an area you want to step lightly with and one of the few places where it might really help to get that trusted second opinion.

In a big portion of the story writing process, I’d recommend going with your gut feelings over anyone else’s opinions. Nobody knows your story and where you want it to go quite like you do.

When it comes to the ending though? There’s a strong chance that your vision might be biased and that second opinion can really help to avoid the trap of writing a mediocre ending and having your story fade from the mind as soon as it’s done.

Like…you’re about to die but you have some time. Like, say it’s one of those apocalypse movie situations, right?

So there’s a meteor hurtling toward the earth. At the same time, there’s been a super earthquake on the far side of the world and a super tsunami is on the way toward you. Also, there’s been a zombie outbreak and your city is overrun and on top of that, there are aliens that have been biding their time at the bottom of the sea for millenia that got all woken up due to the super earthquake and the super tsunami and their sensors blaring alarms at them because a huge planet cracking meteor zipping is toward the planet.

With all of this going on huddled up safe with your family, friends and pets, you have time for one last book.

And the timing is absolutely perfect. The instant you read the last word on the last page, your house gets invaded by zombies as the super tsunami from the super earthquake washes over you and aliens rip off the roof of your house as the water comes in and then the meteor strikes the earth, cracking the entire gorramn planet in half.

So what’ll it be?

What’s the last book you’d want to read? You can chance it on something new, something that isn’t out yet. Or maybe you’d rather go back and read a classic, maybe something you read when you were young and all dewey eyed?

For me…I think I’d go back to Jack London.

He was a turn of the century American novelist and what had always struck me about his stories was the sheer force of them. It’d be a pretty serious internal debate between his Martin Eden or his Sea-Wolf but at the end of the day, I think that Sea-Wolf would be it for me.

A last look at a story that deals with life, the value of life and what it takes to live it to the fullest.

So what about you guys?

Many factors coming together to bring the world to an end and you have time for one last book.

What would you read?