Endings Blogfest! How do you end a novel?

Thanks L.G. Keltner for hosting "The Endings Blogfest!"  And congrats to her on the 2nd anniversary of blogging.

So what do I think about writing endings?

I am obsessed with the right endings.  I wrestle with the endings to my projects for months, and often fixate on them while writing the whole rest of my rough draft.

With the massive project I've been kicking around the last few years, Silver Mask, I even got so tired of waiting that I opened a doc titled it "Ending 1" and plunged right on in.

Setting up the perfect ending, in my head, often teaches me a lot of my characters' various back-stories. Mostly because I'm popping into the most tense time for all my characters and throwing them together in a way they just won't interact at any other point in the novel.

How these characters act when everything hits usually teaches me more about their characters, the direction that they are growing in and their relationships with the other characters than I might see imagining any other time/scene.sequence in a story.

In Silver Mask, the ending is complicated, full of a lot of threads.  I don't want to miss any of them, and i also want to make certain that when the rough draft is done, each character has been developed evenly.  Writing the ending now is going to tell me how to get there.  It'll also tell me what the main tensions between characters are going to be earlier in the novel, by providing me the instances in which these tensions are addressed in some fashion or another.    

Endings are just so much fun for me.