SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
This one’s gonna be long!
Throughout the novel I use repetition intentionally in a lot of places. It’s mostly with character dialogue but I also included it to a lesser degree in some places with the narrator’s voice. I haven’t pointed it out every time I’ve done it, and I don’t expect the reader to pick up on it every time I do it since I don’t expect them to be looking for it, but my hope is that throughout the course of the novel they pick up on it at least once or twice and it’s sort of a cool moment for them.
An example of this that I didn’t highlight was in the chapter 9 when Flynn is in the water after jumping from the steamboat and is desperately trying to find Calvin. He mutters “no” to himself a few times, then later pleads to god for this not to be happening. This is the same thing he did in chapter 2 when he saw Calvin running after him thinking he was about to get stabbed to death by his bayonet. The reaction is the same, the words are very similar, but the situations couldn’t be more different; the first time Flynn says it he thinks Calvin is about to kill him, the second time Calvin has become so important to him and he’s so in love with him that he can’t imagine life without him. I guess I felt like it kind of reinforced some of the elements of dichotomy I was going for with this novel. Maybe that didn’t succeed, but I felt like having the same lines of dialogue repeated in vastly different situations with totally different meanings was neat anyway.
Anyway, I bring this up because I started the epilogue with Calvin seeing Flynn wake up and saying “you’re awake. Thank god, you’re awake and you’re alive.” These are the first words he ever spoke to Flynn, verbatim, when he woke up from the coma in the doctor’s house way back in chapter 4. Here, almost a decade later, he says it playfully, sarcastically, to the love of his life; the first time there was no sarcasm, he was genuinely happy that the soldier he risked everything to save didn’t die. Flynn was important to him both times, but in totally different ways.
I brought back one of the little sub-threads I had going on too by setting Calvin and Flynn’s epilogue on a Sunday and making him sleep in late. That was one of those little things that wasn’t planned when I was outlining the novel but kind of came into the writing organically. You can’t plan everything! Spontaneity in little details like that makes the text feel more natural I think too… that’s something I need to work on. I think I have a tendency to want to tie everything together when I write, and that may limit me to some degree on some of those details that add more color to characters. It works sometimes, but I might need to not always limit myself in that way if I want to create more organic-feeling prose. Something for me to keep in mind, at any rate, since I’m more of a plot-oriented writer than a character-oriented writer – for better or worse.
Anyway, I devoted the most ink in the epilogue to Calvin and Flynn’s fate, of course. And it’s a good fate! As I mentioned in a previous chapter’s writing notes I knew that I wanted them to end up as shop owners in the old West, but making it a tailoring shop was something that kind of came about during the writing process. Maybe I do more of that than I realize, after all!
I knew that I needed to have a kind of monologue about what exactly happened to them in the 7-ish years since we left them, but I wanted to frame it in a kind of day-in-the-life way rather than just tell it. I felt like that would make the read much more intimate for the reader – rather than just say ‘hey guys here’s what happened!’ you kind of have a peek into a day in the life they’ve built for themselves. I couldn’t think of a GREAT way to transition it to the monologue I needed to happen to explain everything, but I figured having Calvin make a mention of one of the critical points in their journey would be a good way to transition into him thinking about the past 7+ years, which of course is really a mechanism to tell the reader what happened.
ANOTHER thing that wasn’t planned from the beginning that I was happy I could tie up was that each part of the epilogue deals with letters, hence the chapter’s title. I knew the letter Edward wrote in chapter 2 was coming back – that was always the plan and I’ll speak more to that when I get to that section. Having letters crop up in the 3 other parts of the epilogue as a way to tie Calvin and Flynn back to the lives they touched, that was not something planned since the outlining phase, but it was something that I think worked pretty well.
ANYWAY, the actual 7+ years between when we left them in early 1864 and meet back up with them in the summer of 1871:
I didn’t want things to be easy for them right out of the gate. They basically ride off into the sunset at the end of the novel proper, but life doesn’t work that way. Calvin almost got killed fording a river, Flynn almost dies from disease. I knew this section might have some of the hallmarks of the old ‘Oregon Trail’ game, but honestly that game doesn’t do a bad job of laying out the biggest hazards of this kind of overland journey in the mid-1800s!
Of course, Calvin and Flynn were traveling on the California Trail rather than the Oregon Trail, but these two trails ran concurrently for a good little while before they split. 1864 was also the VERY tail end of the overland wagon route system, and at this point it legit was mostly deserters from the Civil War. The railroad would make it disappear within just a few years after Calvin and Flynn used it, a point which I was able to illustrate by having them be able to visit Abigail and Henry for Thanksgiving in 1871. It was a real game-changer in transportation and it happened almost overnight after the Civil War.
I didn’t want things to be easy for them once they reached Denver (still called Denver City in 1871) either. Building a life together requires hard work! So Flynn had to endure some time at a shitty job and having Calvin away with his own work for long periods of time.
Real talk, I also wanted Calvin to be a cowboy, at least for a little while. Just because. It fit his skillset, don’t hate! Haha.
So after some years of that they finally buy a storefront, and THEN things are really good for them! I mentioned earlier that I wanted Flynn’s skills to really be the foundation of their livelihood, so in their lives as shop owners Flynn is the tailor while Calvin is the salesman, clerk, stock boy, accountant, merchandise model (since he’s wearing a suit every day interacting with customers) etc. to keep the front of house running. I felt that was a great way to split up their work so that while they were relying on Flynn’s skill as a tailor, Calvin still had a very important part to play. I dunno, I felt throughout the novel that I wanted their relationship to be one where they were equally valued – one has more skill or ability in one area, the other in a different area, but together they can conquer anything.
After the wrap-up of the time between the end of the novel and the epilogue, Calvin again reminds Flynn of their journey all those years ago when he mentions them showing up at Arty’s store before heading downstairs to answer the knock at the door. That sends Flynn back in his own reminiscence, but I wanted to take this opportunity to kind of explore the different ways Flynn and Calvin see their lives in terms of determinism; fate versus choice.
That was something I wanted to delve into a little more in this book, honestly, but I didn’t feel like it really fit into a lot of the places I wanted to put it, and in the end I mostly scrapped it except in a couple little places, and here most prominently. I thought the different interpretations of the flow of the river kind of summarized it. The thoughts I had about exploring determinism and indeterminism are part of why Calvin is named Calvin in the book, and I also thought I might be able to play off the Jonathan/Emily characters, which as I mentioned were sort of grounded in an inversion of A Pilgrim’s Progress. But yeah, in the end I decided you can’t cram everything into one book, and the ideas I had about it almost universally ended up making things clunky, so I dropped them.
That said, the concept of fate does play a pretty big role in the novel I am working on now, which will actually be… pretty different from this one, which might be a bit of an understatement. And while that will take more than a year to finish – maybe longer – I’m also working on a short right now that is mostly about fate, kind of as practice for the novel. This is getting ahead of myself though, I’ll talk about that in detail in my next journal entry, which will be about my next project!
So after that… hmm, not sure if I have as much to say about this part. Calvin comes back with the telegram from Jonathan and Emily, but I didn’t want to have them read it. They will, of course, but first Flynn has to tell him that he’s dressed up on the wrong day, and they have to have their fun.
I also liked that Calvin put the telegram from the foxes on the same table next to the letter he had just finished writing to Lizzie, kind of tying the old and the new together, which is something I also talked a little about – Calvin’s life in two pieces, separated in a real sense into the time before he met Flynn to the time after he met Flynn. He’ll bring these two lives together soon.
Also I wanted it to be clear to the reader that even though the past few years have been tough, Calvin and Flynn are in a very comfortable position now. The painting, the fine furniture, the gold watch, the ability to travel for weeks to another state and forego income from the shop, it all points to the days of money problems being behind them. I toyed with the idea early on about making them actually rich in the epilogue, but I like it better this way, I feel like it suits their personalities a lot better. They’re comfortable, they get to live out the rest of their lives together doing what they love, happily ever after. Why should I shoehorn in something they never said they wanted? Nah, better this way.
To that end, I wanted it to be as abundantly clear to the reader as possible without directly stating it that when we do finally leave Flynn and Calvin for the last time, they will live out the rest of their days happily together. I was hoping the reader would kind of substitute ‘life’ for ‘day’ in the last line Flynn speaks, “It’s still early and we’ve got the rest of our day together,” since my goal for them for this part was an unambiguous happy ending for them. I hope it worked!
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I just can’t help myself introducing new characters way later than I should, can I? Ah well. Jack shows up on his sister’s doorstep to provide the framing device for Jonathan and Emily to find out what happened to Calvin and Flynn.
The three sections after we leave Calvin and Flynn are a lot shorter since, obviously, they’re not focused on the protagonists. I wanted to limit the size of these secondary epilogue segments to under 2,000 words, but I didn’t set a limit to Calvin and Flynn’s section because I was going to just use as much ink as I needed with them. Overall I think it worked out.
I’m not 100% happy with how I set things up here with Jack, but I wanted Jonathan and Emily to discover Calvin and Flynn were still alive by somehow coming into contact with an article of clothing that bore the name of their shop. There was really no way for them to know what happened to them except by chance, and I figured that would be the best way for that to come about.
I decided to make the ending for both Jonathan/Emily and for Lizzie happy because I wanted them to contrast with the very end of the book, which I’ll get back to. I also thought it would be nice for them both to have children and for them both to have named their children after Calvin and Flynn; Jonathan/Emily because of how Flynn saved Jonathan’s life and taught them about love and acceptance, and Lizzie because of how important Calvin was to her when she was a child and how devastated she was when she thought he died.
Not a whole lot else to say about this segment. Jonathan and Emily are living a fairly normal middle-class life in New Orleans, which is their version of the happy ending. The telegram Jonathan is running off to send is of course the one Calvin receive in the first section of the epilogue, but you knew that. :]
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I have an excuse for this one! Lizzie’s father/Calvin’s uncle isn’t a new character! I mean, we never met him when he was discussed briefly in chapter 1, but he was there! Haha.
Anyway, same thing in this section as with the previous one, I just wanted to let the reader know that things turned out great for Lizzie and that she’s a young woman now, no longer the little kid she was the last time we saw her in the novel.
I also wanted to spend a little time with how she felt about receiving the letter from Calvin. Like I mentioned, hearing that Calvin had been killed devastated her, so I was worried that she might feel betrayed or angry at Calvin when she found out he was alive and hadn’t contacted her for all these years. Honestly, this was a little difficult – most of the time you as a writer have some comparable real life experience you can draw on to gauge character emotions. Not like, specific things, but just in general. Like, I’ve never been a soldier or in a war before, but I’ve been scared just like everyone has, and I can kind of imagine what it must be like to be in that situation. That’s no substitute for actually experiencing a situation, of course, but if a writer is limited to only writing about things he has directly experienced then he’s gonna have a pretty sad volume of work!
I think working as a journalist helped me out a lot here, since every day you have to write about things you have no experience with, maybe don’t even have much knowledge about. You have to research it and figure it out and make sure everything is accurate and truthful, and if it isn’t you don’t write it. But in doing so you spend an awful lot of time writing about things you didn’t see, didn’t experience.
Anyway, I’m bringing all this up to go back to the point I was making about Lizzie’s reaction. I have absolutely never been in a situation that resembles what Lizzie experiences here in any way. I can imagine what it would be like to be in a war, but having a loved one who you think has been dead for nearly a decade suddenly thrust back into your life, alive and well? I honestly have no clue how I would react. No clue at all. And because of that it’s difficult to imagine how a character would react.
This thought process is really why I thought Calvin would be so afraid to reconnect with her, knowing he’d already hurt her once by letting her think he was dead. It was understandable years ago, but it’s been too long now, he should have contacted her by now if he was going to… that’s my line of thinking anyway for what Calvin was probably thinking.
Anyway, in my mind they reconnect and everything’s great, maybe Calvin and Flynn visit Pennsylvania sometime down the road like they are visiting the Nix’s in Missouri. Maybe they visit Jonathan and Emily in New Orleans, too. That’s sort of how I imagine the ending to be for all those characters, happy and joyous with their whole lives filled with friends and family ahead of them.
That’s how I imagine it all turns out for Calvin, Flynn, Jonathan, Emily, Lizzie, Henry and Abigail. But of course, that isn’t how the book ends.
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The section with Penelope was the ending I had planned for the book since I wrote the first few lines of chapter 1.
Penelope’s name is borrowed from Odysseus’s wife who waits patiently for his return from the Trojan war, though that Penelope had many suitors and this one had none.
The letter she pulls out and rereads for the thousandth time is the one Edward gives to Flynn for safekeeping the day before he is killed, the same one Flynn almost forgets when Dr. Russell goes to discard his pants. I told you I didn’t forget it! This ending was actually the reason I included those portions about the later way back then… like I said this was the ending I had always planned for the book, way before so much of the middle section was planned out.
The actual wording of the letter is essentially an abridged version of a real letter written by a Union officer to his wife before he was killed in battle:
I wanted to capture some of the cadence and verbiage that was used in the 1800s, and I actually wrote an entire fictional letter that I imagined Edward would have written to Penelope. But I scrapped it. It just… didn’t sound right. I dunno, I can’t explain it, I couldn’t capture the authenticity of the real letter, so I decided to use the real letter with a few minor changes. Is that plagiarism? I don’t think so, maybe some people might disagree. I felt it worked here in the same way copying the draft letter verbatim from an authentic Civil War draft letter worked in chapter 1, the same way using the real lyrics to the song Lorena worked in several parts of the book. That’s my opinion though. I’d never copy prose in any way, but authentic historical documents? I think those are ok to use in context.
Speaking of going for an authentic 1800s sound when it came to speech patterns, I wrote about half of chapter one when I first started this project trying to emulate speech patterns used during this time period, but it ended up sounding awful and I realized there was no way I could do it for the entire novel. I ended up just accepting that the characters would speak essentially how people speak today, and that’s fine.
Anyway, back to the very end of the novel! I chose to have Penelope in this situation – having gotten pregnant from Edward before he left for the war, then left to raise Edward Jr. on her own after he died – for a few reasons:
One, I didn’t want the ending to be entirely happy for everyone. At the end of the day the war is the reason for all the things in the book to have happened, and war is a pretty nasty business. Calvin and Flynn would never have met, but that’s just chance, and really they only got to their happy ending through a whole lot of luck and good fortune. People die in the war, it ruins lives, it has real consequences. I wanted Penelope to be kind of a reminder of that.
Two, I thought it tied in well with the other two side-epilogues, since there’s a theme of family going on in those. Emily, Lizzie and Penelope all have kids at the time of the epilogue, though all their situations are different. Still, while her situation is not great, Penelope can take comfort in being able to devote herself to raising Edward Jr., and take some comfort in knowing the man she loved lives on through him, in a way. It doesn’t replace him, nothing like that, but it means he won’t be forgotten. I dunno, it’s still not a great situation, but like I have mentioned before I always considered Edward to be the third most important character in the entire novel. Flynn and Calvin find each other, but Edward is still the reminder that war only ever tears things apart.
Three, I wanted the option to have Edward’s lineage appear in future short stories! For instance, this won’t be a novel or anything but I had this idea for Edward’s great or great-great grandson be a pilot during World War Two, Edward “Eddie” Finch IV, and his plane would be named “Flight of Finch’s.” I actually strongly considered having a fifth epilogue portion set in the 1930’s where they have to move Edward and Penelope’s graves because of the rising water levels due to a new TVA hydroelectric dam – that happened a lot when the TVA built all the dams in the Tennessee area during the Great Depression, and I figured the village Flynn and Edward were from would be under a lake once that happened. In the end I decided that didn’t fit here though, and would kind of obligate me to write another novel in the Blue and Gray universe, which I’m not sure I want to do. That said, I want to write short stories in this universe, and if I ever write things set in the 20th or 21st centuries I can use Edward’s descendants. :]
The very end of the novel follows the feral wolf back to the snowy stream-bed where the novel began 20 years ago with Flynn as a child scared, aiming the barrel of his rifle at it. Like I said this is 100% where I always wanted the novel to end, right back at the beginning. Did I mention I like tying threads up in my writing? Because I do, haha.
I worked in the symbolism of the river here again, and I wanted to imply that the place where the waters met was sort of symbolic of Flynn and Calvin meeting and then their lives flowing together as one from that point forward.
And of course, something I always planned to do was end the novel in exactly the same way it started:
“The feral wolf smiled in the particular way wolves do. He sat next to an icy creek and patiently waited for the first rays of sunlight to crest the hillside, heat his fur and warm his bones.
There was only silence in the valley.”
Those are the first two paragraphs of the book in chapter 1 and the last two paragraphs in the epilogue. There’s that repetition again that I wanted to be a hallmark of this novel – right back where we started, an endless loop. That’s how I always wanted to end the book. :]
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Acknowledgments ~
Firstly I want to thank YOU for reading! And I mean YOU because anyone who is reading these writing notes all the way to the epilogue is clearly someone who really enjoyed my novel, and that just makes me really happy, haha. As I said in the initial chapter notes this project was really something that I started for me to get back into writing, and I had no idea how it would be received. But between SoFurry, FurAffinity and InkBunny the amount of positive feedback I have received from this project has been fantastic, and it’s really motivated me to keep writing and keep trying to improve. It’s also inspired me to start working on things that might have a broader appeal, maybe even something that I could publish someday. That’s my goal for my next major project!
I mentioned that I drew inspiration from music for a good bit of this novel, and there’s probably more than I can name. Music is probably my number one inspiration for writing, so I can’t really do it justice. I do want to once again mention the music of Black Hill though, since I wrote almost all of this book listening to three albums of his on repeat for like… months and months. His music will forever remind me of this story, for the rest of my life. The three albums again are:
As far as literary inspiration, my favorite author of all time is James Michener, hands down. I’ve read most of his books, and considering that most of them are half-million word tomes I think that’s a bit of an accomplishment! Haha.
Most of his books are basically stories about places rather than people, basically following the history of a place through many interconnected plotlines over the span of hundreds or thousands of years. It’s a type of storytelling I love and is very unique.
His writing style is also really appealing to me. A lot of fiction, for me, seems clunky, weighed down with flowery language, purple prose, that kind of thing. Maybe it’s my background in journalism or simply personal preference, but I have always preferred stories where the author just lays out what happens and lets you, the reader, make interpretations from it. I get annoyed when writers jam in similes and metaphors all over the place; honestly it strikes me as something some writers like to do because they can, or because it’s clever. Maybe it is clever, but I like reading clear, concise, interesting stories. Again, that’s just my personal preference, other people like different things and that’s fine. But that kind of clear and direct storytelling is something James Michener sticks to pretty much all the time, and I really enjoy it.
I drew a significant amount of inspiration from James Michener’s 1974 novel Centennial. It’s not my favorite of his novels – The Source is probably my favorite novel of all time – but some of the elements of one of the chapters in that novel gave me the idea for part of my own novel.
Chapter 6 of Centennial is called ‘The Wagon and the Elephant.’ It tells the story of a young Amish man named Levi in the 1840s kicked out of his home in Pennsylvania, forcing him to head west to an unknown future. There are some superficial similarities there to Calvin, but the big thing that this was the inspiration for was the flatboat journey, since Levi and his young wife travel by this method from Pennsylvania to Missouri. I remembered having read this years prior when I was trying to figure out myself how Calvin and Flynn would make it out west, and it really seemed like a perfect fit for what I was trying to do.
Anyway, I wanted to acknowledge the influence and impact James Michener’s work has had and continues to have on my writing.
There are a few film inspirations for Blue and Gray, as well. Probably the biggest is the 2003 film Cold Mountain, which if you’ve never seen is a decent enough movie, but I liked the premise a lot more than the actual film. Here’s the summary on IMDB, you might be able to see why this was an influence: “In the waning days of the American Civil War, a wounded soldier embarks on a perilous journey back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina to reunite with his sweetheart.”
I kind of imagined it was the sort of journey Edward would take back home to Penelope if he hadn’t been killed. The film was a big part of why I chose to set this story in the Civil War though, and also inspired a couple other little things like the Confederate Home Guard in the scene where we meet Jonathan and Emily.
Similarly, the 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales helped to make me decide to set this in the Civil War, though the story is a lot different from mine.
I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other acknowledgments, ideas that may have crept in from other sources perhaps without me even realizing it, but I’ll leave it there. God knows I’ve talked enough about this book, hahaha. But if you want to know anything else about it, or about what I have going on as far as writing now, or anything else really, send me a message, let me know! I always respond to messages and comments!
That’s it! I’ll be posting a journal entry soon about my next big project. See you then!
