Being a bit clumsy, I often knock over the tower and have to finish a game. The problem I have is that my journal's ending seems too abrupt: one minute I'm performing some tasks, then I die and the journal ends.

I'm wondering whether anyone has thought of a process to gently finish a game.

My current thinking is to execute another turn in order to select some new cards and then use any combination of these cards to provide a scenario/event that I can use to end the game.

How do you finish off a game / end your journal?

I think your solution is a good one! I think many W&A games are sort of designed with the sort of 'aesthetic' of an abrupt and tragic end, but that's not really going to suit the storyteller in some people. I personally love dragging in oracles for that sort of thing, so I might pull out one of my tarot decks and try to apply 1-3 randomly drawn cards to influence the ending.

When I played The Sealed Library my solution was to have my character fully aware that his doom was upon him and left it open to interpretation what death, precisely, he ended up succumbing to. Based on the way my story ended, he had at least 4 possible things that were going to kill him, even if the game itself dictated a specific one. I also left the door open for him to have saved himself, though my character didn't seem to think it was likely. This seemed to satisfy my storyteller needs.

If you'd like to see a different take on it, in my game Bluebeard's Castle, knocking over the tower lead to an end-game phase called "The Eleventh Hour" where your character reaches a crisis point and has one last chance to save themselves. I was trying to replicate the feeling of the end of the fairytale, so if you're playing a game where a possible Eleventh Hour rescue is possible, it may be something to port over.

Although given the time elapsed since this was posted means it may not be of help to the original poster, I hope it will help those of you who find it since. I knocked over a third of a tower during a game and continued on to finish that log (I was playing The Wretched), I decided it meant I was just severely injured. When I knocked the remains of the tower over, I changed the narrative to dying of the wound and finished the diary instead of the default explosion. I feel like if it's plausible to finish the diary before the consequences of the tower tumbling are applied, then it should be done.