How do you know as a writer that one of your episodic series is complete? For instance, the Boston verse has only 4 installments while the LA verse is at 11 and counting. If you can't tell, I'm sentimental about the Boston verse (Ronan's aimless and confused first day of solo driving around the city as a metaphor for how Adam gives him direction in every sense of the word!), even if I've come to love LA Adam and Ronan just as much as their canonical counterparts.
LA verse is marked as incomplete on AO3 because it doesn't have enough of a unified plot for me to feel like it's "done," and because I have two WIPs for it at the moment and have had at least one WIP for it at every point in time since starting the second installment, and because I have vowed to myself that I'm not allowed to call it complete until I finally finish the ding-dang Sarchengsey installment. (Actually when I finish the Sarchengsey installment I might then mark the series as complete, because that has become such a finish line in my mind, but I will feel enormously free to keep adding things to it and will probably continue to do so; any such marking shall be a formality only.)
I also reserve the right to add new fics to Boston verse, because these are my series and I do what I want with any and all of them, but I don't anticipate doing so unless some unexpected inspiration comes along. The reason that series is marked as complete, and the reason that it feels very complete to me after the fourth installment, is that the second installment set up the very obvious need for a very specific emotional beat, that just stood out to me as something that was missing every time I thought of the series, and the fourth installment answers that beat.
Specifically: the tension in the second story is that Adam and Ronan both want the same thing but neither of them feels like they are allowed to ask for it. The story resolves with Ronan finally being the one to ask for what he wants. So for the series to stop feeling like it was missing a note, at least in my ears, I needed a moment where Adam takes the initiative to state what he wants and unequivocally ask Ronan to sacrifice something for him so that he, Adam, can have what Adam wants, even if it means that Ronan loses something. Now that I have that moment, it all feels very complete to me.
(You'll notice that this means essentially the series ended with the first scene of the fourth fic; the rest of that fic is in my eyes an epilogue. An epilogue that is ten times as long as the story it wraps up? Yes.)
LA verse doesn't really have an equivalent "there's one big emotional moment that is going unmet." There are...at least three fics in that series that were inspired by one single sentence in another fic -- who knows what other lines in there might suddenly demand I write three or four or eight thousand words about them! There's a TON of questions in my mind that I keep wanting to know about -- someone asked at some point when and how Adam met Declan in this verse, and you know what, I don't know! But I sure am curious! To the other anon who asked (ages ago, whoops) about a time when Adam is the one to be reassuring Ronan about the relationship, you're totally right! That sounds like a cool thing to see, I'd like to check that out some day!
And all of this is on top of the fact that I like hitting the same notes in this series. Someone or more than one someone has pointed out "all of the porn in this series is just 'Ronan gives Adam what he wants without Adam having to ask for it'" and yeah! It sure is! I like writing that and I might very well write more of it! And then hey, that makes me think, what about porn where Adam gives Ronan what he wants, without Ronan asking for it? Got a WIP like that going now and might do another one after that!
So yeah. It is hard to feel like you have satisfied all requirements when the requirements are vague and multiplying.
I suppose it comes down to "do I feel like this series has discrete, identifiable, specific story points that I really want/need to write, and if so, have I written all of them." If yes to both, then it's complete in my eyes. Obviously if there is one and I haven't written it, then it's not complete in my eyes. But also, if there aren't really specific points that I want/need to write and it's just a question of "I want to play around some more in here," then it doesn't really feel complete because it doesn't really feel completable. LA verse has become something not quite finite, so I don't know that I'll ever really feel like I told all of it.
