SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
As Chapter 9 was the climax of the story, chapter 10 is kind of the denouement. I say ‘kind of’ for a couple reasons.
First, this chapter went way longer than I thought it would – nearly 20,000 words. It was actually about the same length as chapters 8 and 9 combined, which I mentioned in the previous writing notes was originally one long chapter until I split them up. I kind of wanted to do that for this chapter too given its length but I was never able to get a good splitting point, and eventually I just said screw it, chapter 10 will just be enormous, haha.
Second, I really did something here that you’re not supposed to do in a novel, namely introducing new major characters so late. Big no no!
I started on Henry and Abigail similar to how I did in chapter 6 when I started the chapter on Emily and Jonathan. I think in both cases I didn’t want these characters to just appear in the narrative out of nowhere, I wanted the reader to know a little about them before their stories intersected with Calvin and Flynn’s.
Couple other things before I start going through the actual narrative: the chapter title ‘Sea of Tranquility’ follows chapter 9’s, ‘Ocean of Storms.’ I thought it was a good way to tie in the change of pace along with the motif of the moon and the story Flynn told Calvin about when he and Edward were children how they would play in the river and pretend they were ‘space sailors.’ I like tying things together like that, as I’ve mentioned before; I’m a writer who doesn’t like loose ends, red herrings, etc. That doesn’t mean I won’t have some in there on accident or just due to them not being interesting enough to devote space to, but if there are plot elements, themes, symbols, etc. that I make a conscious choice to introduce then I like to resolve them (to the extent they can be resolved) by the time the curtain comes down.
I think I also mentioned previously that the song I referenced at the beginning here, ‘Stable Song’ by Gregory Alan Isakov, inspired a good bit of this chapter. A specific lyric in a different part of that song also lent itself to the name of chapter 6: ‘Ghosts on the Ohio.’ I dunno, I feel like that song really reflects the mood I was going for in this chapter, sort of a sense that Calvin and Flynn have conquered a lot of their personal struggles and escaped from danger, and now they find themselves really for the first time in a place where they feel safe and secure and welcomed. To that end part of the reason this chapter was so long was that I felt like I needed to slow things down in some parts to really emphasize that sense of – as the chapter title would suggest – tranquility. Home.
So, the narrative! After the introduction of Henry and Abigail we rejoin the story with Flynn and Calvin waking up in the cornfield. Calvin dreaming and being woken up was a little bit of a callback to Flynn waking up from nearly dying in chapter 4. When Calvin wakes up and sees a badger’s face he’s basically paralyzed, and I wanted to show Flynn trying to protect Calvin as best he could. I’ve mentioned it before, but one thing I really wanted to avoid was having one character as the strong hero and the other as the hapless ‘damsel in distress.’ Maybe he couldn’t really protect Calvin, but he was sure gonna try.
I think that’s something that I thought of as very important to the character of Flynn. You see that in the continuation of this chapter, at first when Henry doesn’t think he will be able to contribute much on the farm, then with how upset Flynn gets when it really looks like there isn’t anything he can do. Flynn wants to be useful, helpful, he wants to contribute, and when he finally finds a way to really do it it’s really fulfilling for him.
That’s skipping too far ahead though, ha. I tried to add a little humor here, harping on the fact that Calvin keeps using his real name and it’s gotten them in trouble, then almost doing it again and giving a ridiculous fake name. I feel like I have some issues writing humorous content, even though I’d a pretty laid back person who jokes around a lot irl. I need to figure out something to practive that. Writing humorous content is hard though! Especially if you don’t know the readers’ sensibilities on what’s funny and what’s not, I dunno. Maybe I’m overanalyzing it. I think I have a fear of writing something that I think is funny and then it falls flat and is just confusing and weird for the reader, ha. I need some practice in that area in any case though, for sure.
The next section where they are back on the farm is mostly to show a little more about the character of Henry and Abigail for the reader to know that they really are good folks who won’t betray or backstab our protagonists. That goes in with what I mentioned I wanted to do with this final chapter, to give Calvin and Flynn a place that really COULD be home, folks that COULD be family, so that when they do have to leave it’s sort of a bittersweet farewell.
This section also leads into what I was talking about with Flynn wanting to be useful, and him finally really discovering his talent and love for tailoring which has been hinted at throughout the book and which becomes really a big focus on what happens to Calvin and Flynn in the Happily Ever After of the epilogue.
The next section skips forward about a month to the end of the corn harvest. In my mind what I wanted to do was kind of accelerate the pace of the sections forward here at the end of the book, kind of mirroring the beginning of the book where the first few sections are separated by years before it slows down and focuses on the core events of the book over a couple months for 8 of the 10 chapters. Not sure if that came through but that was kind of what I was thinking; it sort of goes back to what I think I talked about a little bit in a previous chapter’s writing notes in that it’s always best to think of your characters as having stories that started long before their appearance in your work and will continue long after its over. I think of Calvin and Flynn the same way, I guess, and we’re just focusing in on this narrow but extremely important time in their lives.
Anyway, I also made the same no-no here again by introducing ANOTHER named character, Cody Nix! To be honest Cody doesn’t serve a huge role in the book, but I needed for there to be a smooth transition from the Nix farm to the beginning of Calvin and Flynn’s journey west, and I thought this character would be a good bridge.
Also – and this is perhaps better served for the epilogue’s notes but I’ll say it here anyway – I want to write some shorts in the future set in the wild west, and ‘The Outlaw Cody Nix’ was something I was thinking would be fun to write. I don’t have any ideas for it right now or anything, but I do love Westerns and if I write some furry-themed Western shorts in the future I want to set it in the Blue and Gray universe, if that makes sense.
This should DEFINITELY be in the next chapter’s writing notes but whatever, I started on this road, haha: although it’s heavily implied in this chapter that Calvin and Flynn are going to end up in San Francisco, the plan was always for them to end up in the old west. And when I say that was always the plan, I seriously mean it – before I started writing chapter 1 and before I knew all the events that would take them there, I knew I wanted Calvin and Flynn to end up together in the old west, living out their days and growing old together in that setting. I’d been using the ‘Western’ tag for every chapter to kind of hint at it, haha.
Like I mentioned I LOVE Westerns, and I wanted characters to kind of be anchors in that setting if I started writing Western-themed stories. That is at least part of where the idea for this story came from for the entire novel. If you have recurring characters in a Western-themed universe – a middle-aged (assuming by ‘Western’ we’re talking somewhere around the year 1885… Calvin and Flynn would be 43 years old then) gay couple that own a shop in town, they need a backstory. What would their story be? Deserters from the Civil War? That sounds like a good idea. Ooh, deserters from both armies! And they met on the battlefield! What a great backstory, let’s write that instead!
And so none of those original Western adventures have been written but the entire life story of the two gay shopkeepers was. Priorities? Lol.
That’s not the ENTIRE genesis of the idea for this story, but honestly that was a legit big part of it. So Calvin and Flynn were always going to end up as shop owners in the wild west whether they knew it or not, ha.
Oy yeah, that 100% should have been in the epilogue’s writing notes, but whatever, it’s here now!
Where was I?
The next section is another big fast forward, a few months after the corn harvest. Like I said, at this point in the novel I am accelerating the pace away from the central events of the book.
Before the sex scene in this portion I wanted to give the sense that Calvin and Flynn were really accepted as part of the Nix family at this point, sort of to reinforce that their eventual decision to leave to continue west at the end of the novel wasn’t the easiest one to make. Really I wanted the Thanksgiving scene to just be a really happy, festive, warm and loving – good food, good friends, dancing, fun. But then there was still the secret that Flynn and Calvin had that they were more than just friends, and that was something that the would never be able to be totally honest about. I felt like that kind of went with this scene: there’s a lot of good here and a lot of love, but at the end of the day you still know it’s not somewhere you can stay.
The sex scene itself I wanted to also be warm, loving and playful in the same way as the Thanksgiving scene. Calvin and Flynn have made their little nest in the loft of the stable – for now it’s their home, and they feel comfortable there.
Ah, one thing I forgot to mention: throughout this novel I tried to throw in references to ancient history or mythology. Honestly that’s probably something I do in everything I write – you can pretty clearly see how much I love history from this story, and even my username on this site is in reference to an ancient civilization so make of that what you will, ha. Anyway, the town of Herculaneum fits in well with that, and I made reference to the fate of it when I said the snow would bury it like Vesuvian ash.
As far as the actual sex scene, I wanted this one to culminate with Calvin finally knotting Flynn. The sex scenes throughout the book have kind of been steadily escalating and I feel like this was the best place to end the last one. I also wanted to add a little bit about the significance of knotting for wolf culture so that it would kind of be an end-cap on Calvin and Flynn’s sexual escapades running through the book, haha. Also I ended this section with Flynn telling Calvin that all he ever had to do was stop fighting, which I felt was a good end-cap for that story arc for Calvin, too.
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And here we are, the end of the book. I treated it almost like a mini-epilogue, the end of the journey detailed in the book but the beginning of their lives together. I almost literally had them ride out into the sunset, but towards the setting moon instead as the sun rose over the East they were leaving behind forever.
And that’s it! I’ll write about the epilogue soon, but I wanted this to be a fulfilling ending for the reader without needing to read an epilogue if they didn’t want to. Hopefully that worked!
