Music is, almost certainly, the biggest source of inspiration and influence for my writing. The skeleton for this story is in the song referenced at the beginning of 3 of its 4 parts, and the outline and theme for it were formed as soon as I’d heard it the first time. It’s a bit ambiguous and open to interpretation, but the thread you can easily discern is of a young man who left home in search of something, casting aside everything to pursue that goal, only to discover at the end – and after hurting many around him – that not only was the goal fruitless, but in its pursuit he’d abandoned what was actually important. This is, of course, not a unique or original premise, but the way the supernatural and spiritual seem to interplay with that base narrative was really interesting to me, and it was something I wanted to explore a bit. The theme (and indeed, the title) of the album from which the song is from – ‘Tarot’ – filled in the gap for me on where I wanted to go with this story: a kind of cosmic tragedy about fate and regret.

A caveat I should point to is that, of course, different music will inspire different people, and the same music will inspire people differently. Metal, as a genre, is not everyone’s bag. It is a genre that I feel works interesting stories into music more than most others though, which is probably one of the reasons I like it. You can similarly see that in some of the music that inspired me to write ‘Blue and Gray,’ notably the album ‘Strange Trails’ by Lord Huron. Indie/folk music also incorporates stories into music, which is probably a big reason I like that kind of music so much as well.

Anyway, enough about that. I could talk about music forever, but really what you get out of music is personal, what speaks to me may mean nothing to someone else and vice-versa, so nobody’s gonna give a shit about how I feel about it, haha. And probably more importantly, it’s almost impossible to translate that feeling into a story, no matter how much you try.

Two big questions I needed to answer before I started writing this one were the specifics of the character and how the story would be structured.

The structure wasn’t too difficult – I wanted the character to repeat the same mortal error several times before being given an opportunity for redemption, which was squandered. The first iteration serves as the introductory anecdote that is sort of a condensed version of the overall story stripped of context. The 2nd iteration reinforces while also also dropping exposition that is needed to put the final part in context. This exposition is fragmentary, but it is expanded and clarified after the 2nd iteration in the scene where the central character pleads with the deity/god. With those pieces in place, the 3rd iteration takes on a new meaning and the whole thing comes together as a cohesive whole. Nothing groundbreaking but I thought it was a structure that would serve this story well.

The 2nd question about the character at the center of the narrative required a little bit of research, but eventually I started seeing that actually several religions have canine gods that are associated with duality or twins, sun and moon, that kind of thing. I was surprised that there are several specific instances of religions where a dog or wolf chases or eats the moon, which I’d never realized before but kind of makes sense in a weird way. Dogs and wolves howl at night, why not have a canine god who chases the moon? But yeah, there are characters like that in Norse, Chinese and Aztec mythology, probably a lot more. I found it interesting that cultures that were so distant had those kind of similarities.

The specific species that I went with, the jackal, kind of carries a little bit of a mysterious, supernatural air, and I think it sort of alludes to an origin in the distant past in itself by way of its association with ancient Egypt.

Once I had that sorted, I needed to figure out specifically where and when I wanted the three iterations of the story to take place. I decided to make the jackal a conquistador in the New World for a few reasons; partly it’s a setting I’ve always found interesting, a clash of cultures unlike anything before or since. It also ties in with the god I seemed to think of my ‘jackal with a hundred names’ being most closely associated with: the Aztec god Xolotl. Given, the setting implicitly has Mayan ruins, but since the story takes place across several centuries in Mexico I thought it was fitting. The story of Xolotl also had a lot of elements that I could use throughout the rest of the story, and I did to a greater degree later in the narrative.

If I’m honest part of it is also that both the subject and structure for this story were inspired by the 2006 film ‘The Fountain,’ which is one of my all-time favs and is set partially in New Spain in the same time period.

I guess that’s enough for background. On to the writing.

- -

I needed a ‘name’ for the jackal that could translate across the three eras he’d be living in. Francisco Rodgrigo worked because it became Frank Roderick in English and I could make it a more modern sounding (though not totally region appropriate) Franco Rodriguez in the modern segment.

I also started each segment with him breathing, inhaling the scent of New World flowers in 1548, exhaling tobacco smoke in 1892, inhaling to try to detect water in 2019. I dunno, I like doing little things like that. I feel like things like that give some continuity to the character, since he’s actually different individuals with different personalities in his different lives.

Miguel Torres / Michael Hightower is kind of the same in that I needed a name that translated from Spanish to English. The ‘tower’ element relates to the Tarot card ‘The Tower,’ which is indicative of sudden calamity and destruction. That’s what I saw while doing my research, anyway – I’m an atheist irl, I don’t actually believe in anything supernatural, but I’ve always found religion and things like that interesting anyway, if for no other reason than their cultural significance and ability to explain historical happenings. In storytelling, when I need a supernatural element I always lean in that direction as well, almost never to the kind of ‘magic systems’ that you see in fantasy and Harry Potter and stuff like that. I don’t like writing about ‘magic,’ I don’t like reading it, I’ve always found subtle gods and a kind of hidden reality behind the curtain more interesting in stories where supernatural elements are needed. Personal preference.

I also saw Miguel/Michael as the kind of mirror image of the jackal, and the fact that a lot of the myths and gods that deal with the dog or wolf chasing the moon seem to also involve brothers, twins, etc. added a lot, I think. If the jackal is Xolotl, Miguel is Quetzalcoatl. If the jackal is Hati Hrothvitnisson, Miguel is Skoll. I felt like that could work. As a little Easter egg I also made the date May 21 for each section, which is the first day under the sign of Gemini in astrology.

The golden statuette is a MacGuffin in this story, for sure. I usually try to avoid MacGuffins, but I decided to go this route here because at the end of the day it really doesn’t hold any secrets or progress the plot in itself. My hope was that it would serve more as a symbol for his wrong decision that presents itself in each of his lives than a real object that he could ever obtain, pry out the jewels, melt down the gold to sell and become rich. It’s the object that mesmerizes the jackal, purposely ostentatious and massively valuable if he were to ever obtain it, but of course he can’t. He can’t be allowed to. That’s the test.

There’s no explanation as to how it ended up where it is, considering he’s seen it so many times before in his previous lives, but that’s kind of the point. Mysteries where even the writer doesn’t know the explanation are extra mysterious… or lazy on the part of the writer. But in this case my excuse is that I didn’t feel that background would add anything to the narrative and was somewhat out of the scope of the story. You’re free to consider it laziness though, that’s valid, haha.

I had a little trouble trying to describe Francisco’s escape. I felt like my descriptions started getting a little too mechanical despite my efforts to pare down as much as I could while still getting the pertinent facts across. I always worry about stuff like that, whether my story is evolving into an instruction manual, this, then this, then that, here are the steps of the process. You can really lose a reader by boring them with segments like that. Pet peeve of mine.

I try to alter my writing style a little when the character is experiencing trauma or turmoil, like once Francisco is away from his pursuers and suffering from his injuries. Shorter sentences. Recitation of facts. A terse detail. Lots of sensory descriptions. I feel like that changes the tone and pace a little for the reader, focusing in on the here and now when the here and now are what matter most. That’s the intent, anyway.

I tried to trail away the descriptions in the way that would indicate pretty plainly that the jackal was losing his mental acuity and grip on reality as the infection in his arm spread through his body, a little hallucination, a narrator that is less than 100% reliable. That stuff is hard for me so this was good practice.

At the end the jackal is chasing the moon before falling into the cenote and drowning. Both the moon and water are recurring elements, which I thought was appropriate since in part I was trying to mesh this story somewhat over the story of the Aztec god Xolotl, partly because the bulk of the story takes place in Mexico and partly because I felt it also fit best. That became more overt later in the story.

- -

The second part following the outlaw Frank Roderick was pretty fun for me. In movies and books and games, I love the Western genre in general, so making stories set in the old West is always great to me.

One thing I worried about here was the continuity of Francisco/Frank and Miguel/Michael. In my mind they are the same souls living these experiences over and over again, but the actual lives they lead in their various time periods can be quite different. The souls are the same, but the lives they are leading in any time period are separate and individual, which I felt was appropriate if the characters could not remember their past lives. I also wanted this emphasized a little more in the different ages of Miguel/Michael in the jackal’s different lives. He was about the same age as the jackal in the New Spain portion, but in this section on the train traveling through Mexico he is significantly older, in his 40s or 50s while the jackal is much younger, and in the last section in the near-modern he is a child. Same souls, different lives. It made sense to me, hopefully it translated into the writing?

Another topic I love, if you couldn’t tell from some of my stories and the name I’m using on this site, is history. Historical fiction is among my favorite genres, James Michener is my favorite writer, and writing stories that kind of weave actual historicity into the narrative are super fun for me to write. So, in this section, I ended up adding a lot of extra detail about the artifact/relic that the professor was toting. I think this was needed anyway to added context in this section so that it wasn’t just a repeat of the previous one, kind of like slowly pulling back the curtain on what’s really happening beyond the surface-level story, as well as to provide some context for the next section where the jackal meets with the primary god of this universe in ethereal space.

Part of it, as well, is to throw in some connections to my other stories. Anything I write that is not explicitly set in a different fictional universe (Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, etc.) I kind of consider to be set in the same ‘furry’ universe, which is mostly identical to ours except populated by anthro folks. So in this section I directly connect the relic to my earlier story ‘Termination Shock’ by implying the statuette is of the god Asherah-El. I also tie in my novel ‘Blue and Gray’ by having Frank’s coat being tailored by ‘Harrison & Riley.’

Anyway, eventually desire for the relic overpowers Frank and he acts. I wanted the scene where he kills Dr. Hightower to be overly violent and gruesome, a kind of juxtaposition to the cordial conversation that had been the focus of the section up to that point. I don’t like writing especially violent scenes and usually shy away from them, but narratively I thought it was necessary to really hammer home how intense the jackal’s desire for the relic is and how he will do anything to get it, regardless of who or what gets in his way. I feel like this was also heightened by how pleasant and friendly Dr. Hightower was, not to mention his naive trust of a stranger. The story is chiefly one of the jackal’s repeated failure, but Michael is the secondary focus, a tragic figure doomed to suffer over and over again until the jackal can break the cycle. If the reader is going to feel sympathy I wanted it to be for him, not for the jackal.

By the time the jackal jumps from the moving train his death is already all but guaranteed from his numerous injuries, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. He’s got a gunshot wound, broken leg and severe bloody lacerations from the broken window glass, but in his mind all he has to do is make it to a doctor and somehow he’ll be able to sell the statuette and be rich.

This is where I wanted to start tying the jackal especially strongly to the Aztec god Xolotl. In Aztec mythology there is a story that the sun stops moving in the sky, and in order for it to start moving again all the gods have to kill themselves. All the gods do this except for Xolotl, who runs away and hides, disguising himself as different plants and animals to remain hidden. He cries so much that his eyes fall out of their sockets, but eventually he is found and killed, and the sun begins to move once again,

One thing that I found interesting about that story is that while Xolotl cries, his tears are not for the other gods who dutifully sacrificed themselves or the people on Earth suffering because the sun won’t move. Xolotl cries only for himself.

In the first section Francisco cries, but for himself and the situation he’s in. He thought of home and childhood, but he did not think of Miguel, the friend he betrayed and killed. Similarly in the second part the outlaw Frank Roderick cries when he realized how fucked he is, but he never even thinks about the innocent professor he murdered. He’s suffering from the consequences of his actions, but his focus is always selfish. He never learns anything. At the end Frank traps himself in the cave – Mictlan – and realizes he’s going to die, but he never feels pity or remorse for his actions, only the outcome.

- -

The next section in which the jackal speaks with the supreme god of his universe took a while until I felt like I got it right. I wanted the deity to clearly be the character Asherah-El from my story Termination Shock, but I didn’t want it to be necessary for the reader to have read that story to understand everything about this one, so mostly I was trying to strike a balance between being specific enough to get across the points I wanted to get across while still being nebulous enough to make the reader feel like the background of this entity was fleshed out without the need for them to know exactly how. There’s also just the challenge that comes from trying to write dialogue from the perspective of an omniscient, omnipotent being. I don’t feel like there’s a right solution, but I’m pretty okay with how this section turned out.

I did a little name drop in the section enumerating some of the jackal’s past lives, mentioning that he was a Minoan merchant in one of them. Because why not. As I mentioned, this name is mostly just from my fondness for history and interest in that specific place and time, interest in the story of the Minotaur and Knossos and the Labyrinth, bull-jumping, etc. Also it’s because when I was a kid Age of Empires was one of my favorite games, and I always chose the Minoans when playing multiplayer. They had the best archers in the game!

Part of the goal of this section was also to clear up any doubts about the nature of the jackal and to be a kind of interesting expository section to put things into context. As I mentioned earlier I was surprised when doing research how many cultures have mythological stories about dogs chasing or eating the moon, so I added in some of the ones I found to link the jackal across cultures. Xolotl, Hati Hrothvitnisson, Tiangou, Wepwawet… he’s all of them and a lot more.

I also needed to make sure the previous sections were fully explained. Through their conversation I wanted to make it clear that the ‘relic’ could never be obtained by the jackal, it was essentially an elaborate test for him, and only by acting unselfishly once could he break the ‘Cycle’ he was in. The implications of this aren’t important, not really, and I wanted to make it open to interpretation. At one point I do mention that he stands to inherit this world if he can break the cycle, but what that means isn’t elaborated on. That’s way beyond the scope of this story, and frankly I don’t have an answer for it. It’s enough to know that the stakes are high, the ‘Cycle’ (whatever it is) can be broken, so far the jackal has failed at every opportunity but it will never end until he makes a different choice.

- -

I wanted to make the last section in or near present day. I settled on 2019 mostly because that would make sense as a year when border patrol would be very active and also I didn’t want to deal with anything related to covid, haha. In keeping with the idea that it’s the same souls but different lives with different experiences, I made Miguel/Michael a child in this timeline rather than an adult.

I leaned more heavily and blatantly into the Xolotl angle in this section. The wind jewel that the jackal wears around his neck is a direct reference to this, since this is something that is directly associated with both Xolotl and his brother Quetzalcoatl, which Miguel can be viewed as. Whether it does or doesn’t actually speak to him and tell him where to find the cave is not addressed, so the reader is free to interpret that as they wish.

The jackal pleaded for the god to give him memory of his previous lives in the last section, so I wanted the latter section of this part to imply that he kind of had at least a partial memory through dreams in this life. Descending down into the cave and finding the skeleton of Frank Roderick – one of his previous lives – also has parallels to Xolotl in that in Aztec mythology Xolotl descends down into Mictlan to retrieve bones of the previous inhabitants of the world to start new life on Earth. I also mentioned the ‘Harrison and Riley’ coat once again because as I mentioned, I view this as taking place in the same ‘universe’ as Blue and Gray and all of my other stories not associated with different IP.

Franco has a Taurus Millenium pistol both because I thought the name of it is sort of in line with the idea of fate, fortune, tarot, astrology that weaves through the story, and also because in real life it’s a pretty cheap, crappy gun that I’d imagine would be in line for a character in Franco’s line of work.

As for the ending, it’s of course heavily implied that Franco repeats his mistake once again, murdering Miguel and taking the relic. I felt that was the best place to end it. I’d also had the ending of the story set before I filled in a lot of the rest, namely him saying that it was his ‘fortune,’ meaning his treasure/wealth but also with the real implication that it’s his fate to repeat the same mistake once again. The details of how he ends up getting killed this time and what the future holds are not spelled out, but the reader knows what will happen in broad strokes.

Anyway, that’s it! This one was a lot of fun for me. I know this kind of story will never get the same kind of traction here as porn stories, but it’s good practice for me since this is the kind of writing I’m working on on the side. I actually started this specifically as practice for a novel I am writing that I’m hoping to publish some day, but that’s a long way off.

It's been a while since I've posted anything new. Over a year, in fact. That's shitty. I thought it'd be a good idea to make a journal post about it and share some good news.

The TL;DR of it is that work got really crazy last year for me and stayed crazy, to the point where I didn't have time or energy to do much else for a long time. I finally quit my old job and started a new one a few weeks ago, and I'm hopeful that this will allow me to get back into writing at the level I'd like to, both here and on other projects.

Longer story/vent, for anyone who cares:

It kind of started to go south for me at my last job around the time COVID became a thing in the spring and early summer of last year, though it really wasn't related to coronavirus.

I was on a team of 3 people and we more or less shared the workload equally between ourselves. Around April or May of 2020 one of my coworkers left for a different company, and another got promoted to a new role internally. Within the span of a couple months I'd transitioned to doing the work of 3 people.

I thought this would be temporary. Yeah it'd suck for a few months while we found new people to fill the roles, but after that it'd be back to normal, right?

Nope. They just didn't hire anyone to fill those roles.

I was able to do the work, and was able to keep it together for a long time. I actually got promoted in October of last year (which was kind of shocking to me at the time) and I thought that would let me transition into other things and shift some of my former duties to analysts in other regions of the country. But instead shit just getting piled on and on and on.

It really is true, what they say about the frog. If you throw him in the pot of boiling water he'll jump out, but if you slowly increase the temperature he'll boil alive without ever realizing it.

By March of this year I was regularly working 80 hour weeks. I took a week off near the end of the month, it would have been the first time I'd taken off work since being promoted. But I realized at some point it would actually be my first DAYS off since then, too. I'd worked every weekend, Saturday and Sunday. I worked on Thanksgiving. I worked on Christmas. Looking back I realized there wasn't a single day over 6 months that I hadn't worked.

The week off came, but shit ran over and I ended up having to work on the first Saturday, too. And Sunday. On Monday I slept in, but I got a text from another coworker telling me that there was something that absolutely had to get done that day that I was supposed to do that had fallen off my radar.

I stealth worked. On my week off I stealth worked. I was disconnected from Microsoft Teams, my out of office was up on Outlook, but I was working. Even working 80 hours a week I was so far behind on a dozen different things that I felt like I needed this time to catch up.

The breaking point came in May of this year. I remember specifically, May 10th.

After I got promoted my boss expected me to start -- and I shit you not -- performing duties for the role above mine.

Without getting into too much detail about the job or my work, it's not as crazy as it sounds. Since I stopped working as a writer I've been working in finance, and in the particular field I'm in when you get hired on as an analyst the expectation is that you'll do it for a few years, gain experience, and then start working at the higher level role with the title 'Senior Analyst' for a while before actually getting promoted to the real higher role.

I'd been promoted to Sr. Analyst, but I was still saddled with the grunt work of three analysts, so I really didn't have time to do the next-level shit. I've never been in a job before where I felt I had no good options and every path led to failure. Have you? It's cliche to say, but it's soul-crushing. You're working like a slave and still made to feel like you're a screw-up who can't get his shit together.

So yeah, May 10th. I'd gotten a really bad performance review for the past year (2 out of 5) and one of my bosses had scheduled these remedial strategy sessions first thing in the morning every Monday. This one went particularly bad, with him specifically saying 'maybe (specific industry and job role) isn't right for you,' which is corporate speak for 'your head's on the chopping block.' I mulled that over for about half an hour before I got a call from another one of my managers, basically berating me for something that was sub-par that I'd worked on all weekend.

I think it was about noon on the 10th when I decided to leave. Really decided, I mean. You know you think about it often when you're in a shitty situation like that, but I really made the choice to leave then.

I started looking for other jobs, had a few interviews. Everything's over Zoom now, which helped a lot since I didn't have to take time off for interviews. Again, without getting too specific, the role within the industry I was in is pretty high demand, and I actually turned down two offers before I accepted one. The timing was perfect too, since the day before I gave my direct manager my two-week's notice he has scheduled a meeting for the following Monday titled 'PIP,' and someone from HR was on the meeting invite. PIP stands for 'performance improvement plan,' and it's basically what happens when they are trying to set the ball rolling to fire you. So yeah, perfect timing.

Anyway, I took a couple weeks off (real weeks off) at the beginning of August before I started my new job. I went on a 3 day hike, I went kayaking, I did nothing for a few days. It was great.

I started my new job about 3 weeks ago. So far it's going good. I know things went to shit at my last job, and I can lay blame at other people, but I have to acknowledge that part of it was the fact that I never said 'No' when new work came in. There's only so much one person can do, and I let it get to an untenable point. It shouldn't have happened, but I also shouldn't have let it happen.

So at this job I'm going to make a more conscious effort to draw boundaries. Actual 40 hour weeks more often than not, turning down projects when I don't have capacity, prioritizing my well-being.

ANYWAY, all that to say that my writing output has been non-existent for a long time, but I should be able to devote more time to it now!

So! I’ve started working on my next major project after I finished Blue and Gray a few months ago! I haven’t started the writing phase yet; I’m still outlining and planning, and there are still a few big things I haven’t figured out yet. But I think that in the next month or so I will be to a point where I can start work on the actual writing!

This project will not be very similar to Blue and Gray, I have to say that straight away. It won’t be a romance, it won’t even have truly erotic content, though that’s not to say it won’t have adult situations, violence, that kind of thing. It’s not smut, but it’s not for kids.

So what is it?

It’s a monomyth story with anthropomorphic characters, a furry hero’s journey. That’s the simplest way I can put it. The main protagonist is an anthropomorphic rat. I have a name for her: Raziel.

Whereas Blue and Gray was an intimate, narrowly-focused story about two characters in over their heads and just trying to survive and escape together, this one (which I don’t have a name for yet) is much larger in scope. Raziel will embark on a journey of her own, encountering friends and foes alike of many different species, but it won’t be simply for her to escape to a better life – the fate of her tribe, her new friends, and possibly (definitely) a whole lot more hang in the balance.

This is all extremely vague here, of course, but I do have a good bit of the plot worked out. There were several things I wanted to do with this story, and honestly it took me quite a while to come up with a concept that includes everything, but I think I’ve worked it out for the most part.

One – I wanted there to be a real reason for the characters to be anthropomorphic. In Blue and Gray this is never really explained other than author’s preference... which is the actual reason for it, at the end of the day. That story could have been written with human characters. I wanted to write a story where it really makes sense on a deep level for the characters to be anthropomorphic and plays a real, indelible, critical part in the story.

Two – and this is the tough one – I wanted to incorporate elements of numerous real-world histories, religions and mythologies into a story, and have some of those mythological elements actually come into play during the course of the story. If you’ve been reading my writing notes for Blue and Gray you know that this is something I love doing, for better or worse. I have specific things I’ve come up with for this story that I think will work.

Three – I wanted to incorporate those elements without the use of any kind of magic system or divine interaction whatsoever. There is no magic in Raziel’s world, no gods, though many believe there are and some of the things she sees and experiences may make her think there are, too.

The difficulty will be tying that all together, but like I said I think I have figured out a story where it really all makes sense. There are other elements that are as important to me as the ones listed above that I have also tied into the skeleton of a plot I have right now, but I don’t want to mention a lot of them since they will need to be revealed organically. I don’t want to spoil anything before I’ve written down the first word, haha.

Anyway, I thought I’d put this out there so folks know what I’ll be working on for… at least the next year, maybe two if this gets as complex as I think it could.

Of course I’ll still be writing shorts and posting them every so often! The two shorts I’m working on now are kind of practice for elements of this novel, but after than I have some more ideas for pure smut, haha.

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!

- -

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. :]

- -

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.

- -

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Ballou

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. :]


- - - - - - -


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:

Black Hill and heklAa – Rivers and Shores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTvJUa6Vg78
Black Hill and Silent Island – Tales of the Night Forest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTLunRuCGQQ
Black Hill and heklAa – Mother of All Trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwuNaSlq4I

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!

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.

- -

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!

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Not sure how long this one will be, I’m not sure I have as much tangential stuff to talk about for chapter 9 as I did for chapter 8, ha.

I will say that initially chapter 9 and chapter 8 were one big chapter. I had planned to have the entire time Flynn and Calvin spent aboard the Sultana to be contained in a single chapter, but the more and more I wrote the less and less appropriate it seemed for it to all be one enormous chapter. I felt like the two of them fleeing from Mason back to their room served as a pretty good separation point, and the fact that it occurred about halfway through the combined chapter helped too. They didn’t get split into two chapters until I was pretty much finished writing them though!

That’s also a big reason why chapter 8 didn’t have a sex scene, I guess. At first I had planned on having one in every chapter after chapter 5, so when 8 and 9 were combined there was the one in this chapter that fit that role. That was part of the reason I resisted splitting them at first, but eventually I figured it was better not to have an enormously long chapter just for the sake of keeping the number of sex scenes consistent.

Then I ended up making chapter 10 enormously long anyway undermining what I just said, haha. There wasn’t any natural break-point where I could do that in 10 like I could in 8/9 though.

But I’m getting ahead of myself!

If I’m real honest I’m not totally happy about the first half or so of this chapter. I knew I wanted them stay on the steamboat until they were fairly close to St. Louis, so I needed them on board for several days. Last chapter played out pretty much exactly how I wanted to but… I dunno, I guess I just kind of felt like I wrote myself into a hole at first.

It took me a while to figure out how the next couple days would play out in the story. I thought about things like having them hide in some part of the ship or something, but eventually I decided on them barricading their room because I was just trying to mentally think about what I might do in that situation. That’s not to say it would be the right decision, but at the same time throughout the story I’ve been comfortable with Flynn and Calvin making their decisions regardless of whether it was the ‘right’ decision. They’re not perfect, they’re not omniscient, they make mistakes along their journey and they get saved by blind luck more than once. I felt like this kind of fit into that character for them. Was barricading themselves in the room their best option? Probably not. But it was the best one they could think of at the time. That’s how I view it anyway.

I felt like I took way too long to explain out what their new plan was, the reasons why this thing or that thing wouldn’t work, why they had to be separated when they jumped, all that stuff. Going back to what I just said, I feel like for any character it’s not necessary for them to make the best decision or the right decision, but the reader needs to be clear on WHY they made a particular decision even if it turns to a disaster. It’s like in horror movies, seeing a character make a BAD decision is fine, but seeing a character make a STUPID decision kind of takes you out of the experience, ruins the suspension of disbelief. I guess that’s my justification for spending so much ink on their plan.

The second thing I’m not totally happy about is the transition from their conversation to the chapter’s sex scene, and really just the events surrounding it. I’m happy with the sex scene itself – having them switch and Flynn top for at least one scene was something I wanted to do for a couple reasons, not least of which because as I mentioned in a previous chapter’s writing notes I wanted to portray Calvin and Flynn as equals in the sense that I didn’t want Calvin to be a white knight and Flynn to be a damsel in distress. This specific scene – Flynn in lingerie nailing Calvin while they’re in a steamboat suite – was actually one of the earlier sex scenes I planned out as well, so I knew I wanted to incorporate it into the book. Still, it felt a little like I was shoehorning it in there for the sake of it being there, and I never really figured out a great way to prevent that. The alternative was basically to write an erotic novel where there’s already no sex until a third of the way though, then have a 30k word gap in the last third where there’s no sex. Still, it kind of felt a little forced. I’m still not sure what I should have done differently, but like I said I’m not entirely happy with the route I ended up going in. At the same time, one of my goals for this book was to FINISH it, not let it drag on to be a multi-year project. I honestly mulled over what I could do differently for a few weeks and had written a bit of the next chapter before I decided to just move on. Ah well.

Anyway, moving on with the notes. I am a lot happier with the second half of this chapter, or I guess the final third after the sex scene. As I mentioned in the previous chapter’s writing notes I left Captain Mason’s actual plan pretty open-ended, but I didn’t think it would be unreasonable for him to decide to just let them stay in the room for several days with guards outside the door, waiting for them to get close to St. Louis before trying to capture Calvin.

What I’m happy with in this part is not the writing per se, it’s the tying up of a lot of plot elements into one climactic event. I’m not the kind of writer who puts out red herrings just to do it or goes into lengthy subplots for them not to tie into the central events of the story – I think that’s from my background in journalism rather than fiction writing. But I was happy with the way I was able to work a lot of the ideas I introduced into the climactic scene: Calvin’s PTSD, his inability to swim and the notion that to move forward he had to stop fighting, Thayer’s gun, the stolen cigar case, Mason’s greed, etc.

One thing that I was especially happy with was tying together the moon and the river, which were the two biggest motifs I had running through the book and were symbolic of the larger overarching dichotomy I was shooting for in the book – the warm, living, dynamic, flowing river vs. the cold, dead, static, unchanging moon. Good and evil. Love and hate. Union and Confederacy. Blue and Gray.

That was my thought process, anyway, for those two divergent ideas, how to incorporate them into this novel and the name of the novel itself. Did it work? I dunno. In my mind it worked and that’s what I was going for, but who knows.

I had a little bit of a concern with Calvin smashing Captain Mason’s hand in the door when he was trying to untie the knots Flynn tied with the drapery, since that went against the story arc I was going for with him, but I felt at the same time that since he had his third and final PTSD flashback right after that it was kind of illustrative of the fact that this was not a path forward for him. That also bought a little time for him to recover before they started smashing down the door with an axe. For that scene I switched to very short paragraphs and splitting the axe blows into separate lines, since I thought that was a way to kind of differentiate the danger of the situation from normal paragraph styles. I did the same thing when they were about to jump from the window.

One thing I wanted to do when they were actually in the water was to split the narrative again into their own personal points of view until they were together again. This is how the narrative went through the first few chapters until their stories converged into one, and I wanted to split it here just briefly as a kind of way of highlighting that they are, for this moment, alone again. Calvin completes his arc and finally stops fighting as he lets go of the gun and starts floating again to the surface, while Flynn panics as he realizes that he doesn’t want to live his life if he has to live it without Calvin and he may have just lost him. Their stories converge again when they look at the moon, recalling what Calvin said in an earlier chapter about looking at the moon and thinking of the one you love, and Calvin emerging from the cold depths back to life with Flynn. That was the idea anyway!

After they swim back to shore (or rather, Flynn swims back pulling Calvin, ha) I wanted to include for the reader an abridged version of the Sultana disaster, mostly to put an end-cap on Mason’s story since it wouldn’t really get resolved in the same narrative as Calvin and Flynn’s, since they’d never see each other again.

And of course them walking exhausted into the corn field and falling asleep sets up the final chapter. :]

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS



Chapter 8 is named, of course, for the doomed ship Sultana which Flynn spies in the previous chapter and on which they spend most of this chapter and the next.

This portion of the book actually took the longest for me to flesh out in the outlining stage. I had the story pretty much thought up mostly in its current form up to the end of the last chapter but it really took me a long time to figure out what to do with their journey from Cairo to St. Louis.

I can’t remember exactly what caused me to connect the Sultana story – which has always fascinated me – to this one. I think I didn’t consider it initially because the timeline of the actual Sultana disaster doesn’t fit at all with this story. But when I looked into it I saw that the steamboat was in service on the same route during the time of my story, and although I knew I couldn’t use the actual explosion as a story point (which, in retrospect, I think would have been a mistake anyway) I thought that there must be some way to use it in the narrative.

Eventually I decided to use the steamboat as more of a backdrop, focusing more on the character of the ship’s captain, James Cass Mason.

James Cass Mason is the only unambiguously evil character in the book. This story doesn’t really have a central antagonist, at least not any single character, but if there was one then Captain Mason would fit the bill. Sgt. Thayer wasn’t evil, he was trying to do what he thought was his duty as a soldier. He posed a threat to Calvin and Flynn, but ultimately he was inept at his task. Captain Mason is meant to be an entirely different kind of threat: devious, cunning, heartless, and above all greedy, which proves to be his undoing.

James Cass Mason was the captain of the real Sultana in real life, of course, and so the character is the only character in the book that is based on a real person. Normally I’d have an issue casting a real person in the kind of overwhelmingly negative tone Captain Mason is portrayed as in the book, but I’ve always felt that James Cass Mason, in real life, is one of the greatest villains in American history, despite how little known he is. In real life it was his greed that caused 1,500 men to die, men that had been through years of hell on earth surviving Confederate prison camps – freed and happy that the war was finally over and hopeful for a future that would never come. I dunno, I’m not gonna retell that whole story, but the more you learn about it the angrier you get, and that’s a feat for something that happened 160 years ago. Such a senseless, selfish, preventable tragedy. But yeah, the real James Cass Mason gets absolutely no sympathy from me, and I had no qualms about portraying him as a monster in this book.

Anyway, back to the story! I spent a little time with them parting ways with the foxes and the ferryman, partially to reinforce that they’d grown close to Jonathan and Emily. Another slight anachronism here is that during the Civil War there was a fort at the convergence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in Cairo, but in the story it’s the nondescript sandy embankment which is there today. I felt that was all right, since there’s a lot of disagreement today about where the fort was or if it was even really much of a fort at all.

Them going into town to get new clothes is meant to set up several things besides just transitioning from the relative safety of the flatboat back into the danger of the wider world. Mainly it sets up the drama that occurs later in the chapter on the steamboat, but I also wanted to make Flynn’s love for clothing and interest in tailoring very clear. It was there in the first chapter in the way he carefully folded his clothes before going swimming instead of just tossing them aside, and of course with the blue coat he loved to wear, and it’s also kind of referenced in a couple other places, but I didn’t want what happens in chapter 10 and where they end up in the epilogue to come out of nowhere. I also figured that it would help to explain why he was so on-board with dressing as a woman to disguise themselves.

Anyway, from the tailor’s shop they head to Sultana, and of course that’s where they encounter Captain Mason for the first time. I introduced him looking at his watch and enumerating the various schemes he used to bilk passengers to get the reader to kind of get the picture of who this guy was and what he was about very early: selfish and greedy, but also cunning and devious. A dangerous person for Flynn and Calvin.

From the start he tried to goad Calvin into a violent reaction because he knows that this would justify being able to arrest him on the spot. He doesn’t initially know he’s a deserter for sure but he senses that something is up. He also sees the expensive clothing Calvin and Flynn are wearing and he’s jealous of him because he thinks his “wife” is knockout gorgeous and wants that, too. Ultimately it’s this insatiable greed that lets Calvin and Flynn escape; if he had arrested them as soon as he found out for sure Calvin was a deserter they would have been done for. If he’d done it without trying to steal the cigar case full of money or trying to seduce his “wife” that would also have been game over. But he wanted everything, he wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t have it all, and because of that Calvin and Flynn were able to escape. I dunno, that’s what I was going for with this character, and I hope that chain was clear to the reader.

Ah, I also wanted to make sure I included that he would habitually make up for lost time by overheating the Sultana’s boilers, did that at the beginning and also as the punctuation at the end. Again, I didn’t assume the reader would have knowledge of the actual Sultana disaster, but I wanted to include those things.

The scene where they get back to the room is mostly to show that they are panicking and caught off-guard, but before they can think of anything they are interrupted. I had to condense the time a bit here and I’m not happy about it or totally satisfied with how it ended up, but I didn’t want for Calvin and Flynn to have a chance to think of a plan, I wanted the tense encounter with Mason to happen quickly. So they are interrupted by the bear, Sgt. Granger, and made to leave.

Of course I also wanted to give Granger a bit of a personality; I didn’t want the men in the room with Mason to be cartoony nameless henchmen. I never really elucidate on what Mason’s actual scheme is, and I think it’s better in a sense that the reader doesn’t really know what he’s up to.

To that end, I wanted it to be clear that even the other folks in that room may not have been aware of what Mason’s plan was, at least not in its entirety. Granger thought it was solely to get them out of the room so someone could sneak in and steal the money, which was part of it, but there was more. The ox was clearly a bit of a dullard and was clueless, and it’s unclear how much the horses or the Major know.

Honestly, I myself never formulated what Mason’s entire plan was for the ruse. Sometimes if you want to write a mysterious or cunning or devious character, I think it’s best to leave things there. There is no right answer, just as there is no right answer about Cletus’ true nature. It’s whatever the reader envisions.

- -

I feel like that’s a pretty good segueway into something else I wanted to talk about in the writing notes for this chapter. I’ve always felt that when an artist creates a painting or a musician creates a song or a writer creates a book, once they’ve completed it then it exists apart from them. It doesn’t really belong to them any more – if it ever did – it belongs to the people who gaze at the painting or listen to the music or read the book. Like, I could have a definitive answer for what Mason’s plan was, but if it isn’t in the book then my view as an author isn’t any more valid than any reader’s. That’s my thought on authorial intent, anyway, the “death of the author” idea that a work exists independently of its creator and shouldn’t require familiarity with the creator to divine meaning. To me there is no right way or wrong way to read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music since art is such a personal thing.

So where am I going with this tangent?

At some point in these writing notes I wanted to acknowledge the influence music had on me both for formulating the story and for actually writing it. I started each chapter with lyrics, which I realize is a kind of hallmark of shitty fan fiction and disqualifying for publication, but at the same time this story is personal to me and I wanted to share a little bit of that with the reader. Not to impart any specific message, since my hope was that the book might also feel personal to the reader and it’s up to them to decide what’s important – mostly just for me.

A lot of the lyrics/music I chose kind of reinforce or echo what’s happening in the story if they didn’t directly inspire it; that was something I actively tried for and it inspired a lot of things I don’t think I would have considered otherwise. The songs for four of the first five chapters all are very specific to the Civil War. Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Stable Song” directly inspired a decent portion of chapter 10. For the scene in chapter 5 where Flynn and Calvin make love for the first time next to the stream, the song “Meet me in the Woods” by Lord Huron pretty much directly inspired it, so I wanted to include it. There’s a couple other examples.

To that end, the album “Strange Trails” inspired a couple other things, like the scene where Flynn is in the water searching for Calvin in chapter 9. I dunno, I listened to that album for the first time right as I was starting this project in earnest and it kind of felt like it went with what I was trying for in a weird way. Sometimes the lyrics link up, sometimes they don’t, but it had a feel that felt like it fit. Here’s a link to it if you’d like to give it a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiwWgN5O3WQ

Following this tangent even further, while the songs that I used for the chapter openings were meant to echo the story they are not what I listened to when actually writing. I’ve always listened to music when writing, and I find relaxing music with no lyrics the easiest for me to get into the zone.

As I started writing the book I found myself listening to a lot of post-rock. Just a few days into the writing I discovered an artist, a Hungarian guitarist named Czarnogurszky István who was making collaborative albums under the name “Black Hill.” As I kept writing I kept listening, and after a month or two I really found that I had developed a strong association with this guy’s music and my own story, Blue and Gray.

I legitimately can’t overstate that association, or really even do it justice here. I’d say 95% of Blue and Gray was written while I was listening to three albums, over and over again, for what had to have been hundreds and hundreds of hours.

These three:

Black Hill and Silent Island – Tales of the Night Forest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTLunRuCGQQ

Black Hill and heklAa – Rivers and Shores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTvJUa6Vg78

Black Hill and heklAa – Mother of All Trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwuNaSlq4I

Looping back to what I said earlier, as I said I feel that once someone creates a piece of art it’s no longer theirs, not really. It belongs to the viewer, the reader, the listener. I don’t know Czarnogurszky István, I wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him on the street, and he has no clue who I am or what his music has meant for me. Likewise, someone reading Blue and Gray wouldn’t have any clue of the strong association I personally have between his music and this story. He created the music, but I as a listener ascribed my own meaning to it, and that’s something I’ll always carry with me.

That’s how I feel about art. Deep down I think I hope that someday, something I write will be felt the same way to someone else even if I never know who they are – my story becomes their story.

- -

Tangent over! Where was I? Ah yeah, Flynn and Calvin in the lion’s den!

As I mentioned I wanted it to be ambiguous what the totality of Captain Mason’s scheme was, who was in on it, who knew what. Going back to music, I wanted to tie in the song “Lorena” from chapter 1 into this section. This was a real song that would have been well-known to soldiers on both sides during the Civil War and has its own history, check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_(song)

I also wanted to contrast it with the much more elegant and beautiful music that Lt. Granger played initially, Bach’s Allegro Assai from his concerto for violin in A minor, which kind of transported Flynn away from the moment and the danger briefly. I guess that was kind of an homage from me personally to the role music had in the writing of this book.

Once Granger began playing Lorena and Mason forced Flynn to dance with him I wanted to reinforce how much of a scummy dude Mason was. That and, more importantly, I wanted to created a rising tenseness that eventually came to a crescendo. The more nasty things he said in Flynn’s ear and the more he groped him (thinking he was a woman) the more incensed Calvin became, which was exactly the reaction Mason was hoping for. Meanwhile the lion character, the Major, notices Calvin has his hand on a gun and is ready to shoot him down if he makes a move.

I don’t really have a lot of experience writing scenes like that so I’m not sure if it totally achieved the effect I was hoping for. Based on the feedback I’ve gotten I think I did all right but I still feel like I could have done a little better, especially the portion at the end. I wanted the reader to feel like the danger of Calvin shooting the captain and then getting shot himself was real even though, of course, Calvin and Flynn aren’t going to get killed in this story. I feel like that can be an issue in most stories; you know the protagonists aren’t going to die, but you still want the dangerous moments to feel dangerous, you know? I think that’s where previous events help create the notion that these things are possible. Edward was a major character and he died, Flynn got shot earlier and Calvin killed an enemy soldier, so clearly this is a universe where actions have consequences and danger is real, right? That’s what you hope the reader thinks when you’re writing something like this even though you as the author know how things turn out and that you were never really going to let your protagonists die. Hopefully readers felt that the tension in the room was real!

Also, I really, really didn’t want Calvin to kill anyone here or anywhere in the book after he killed the badger because that would totally undermine one of his central arcs in an unforgivable way, in my opinion. He came close and he was on the edge, but just like before if he had fought he would have died. The Major would have killed him. The only way forward was to stop fighting.

That’s true for him, anyway. Flynn saves him indirectly like he does a few other times in the book by making a scene and slapping Captain Mason silly, providing them both the chance to escape. I realize that I portrayed Flynn as small and physically weak compared to Calvin throughout the book, but Calvin is meant to be exceptionally strong. At the end of the day Flynn is still a man, so his slap was a lot more powerful than Mason had ever been slapped by a woman.

The end of the chapter is meant to very strongly suggest that the Major and Lt. Granger are both gay and that this might be the beginning of a closer relationship between them. That’s their story though, not Calvin and Flynn’s, and we’re not following that thread. We have to leave them and their possibilities behind when our protagonists rush out of the room.

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS



As I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes I had a kind of mini-arc in mind for the character Jonathan. The beginning of the chapter is mostly the pivot-point for that arc, with Jonathan falling overboard after recoiling from Calvin due to his homophobia, then being rescued by Flynn. I don’t think there’s too much to say about it other than that, perhaps that it’s also called back to later in the book in chapter 9.

I think I also mentioned that I had to make a couple choices as far as anachronisms in this book; I tried to keep them to a minimum as much as possible but I felt it was okay to let some things slide here and there if it was in service of the story. That was the decision I made when I presented the battle of Gettysburg as occurring over only 1 day rather than 3, and it’s something I decided was all right here when Flynn saves Jonathan with CPR. CPR wasn’t known back in 1863, but I figured I could maybe get around that if it was presented as a kind of Appalachian folk remedy type thing that Flynn learned from his dad? CPR wasn’t known back then, but it would still work if people had known about it, and I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that someone would have. Anyway, I thought the image of Flynn saving him with the kiss of life kind of served as a good (though unsubtle) snapshot of the story within the story I was trying to tell with the character of Jonathan.

Calvin’s PTSD flashback in the face of the tumult is the 2nd of 3 in the book. It kind of leads to their relationship being exposed to Cletus and also reinforces that Calvin is still dealing with his own trauma, just as real as Flynn’s healing leg but not apparent from the outside.

Originally the conversation that Flynn and Calvin have that night with Emily was more tense, but I really didn’t feel like that was the right way to go after she had tried to defuse that kind of tenseness with Jonathan in the last chapter. I think it works better this way and fits her personality better, both in terms of trying to protect herself and Jonathan and also that she is the smart, level-headed one in their relationship. Taking a step back, I also made her the more overtly religious one of the two of them because I thought that would make for a more interesting dynamic and a character that wasn’t so cliched. She’s in the midst of change as much as any of them, caught between an old life and a new one. She’ll be able to process and think through all this in time, but right now she’s just trying to survive with her husband. That’s how I viewed her character, anyway.

The scene after that I felt might have been a little sappy but I wanted to include it. An undercurrent I was trying to go for in this book as a whole was that no matter what they did, they’d never be accepted by society at large because they’re gay, and that the best they can ever really hope for is to just have each other. That’s not an especially happy thing to think about, but that was reality in 1863 and it was reality for most of history until like, ten minutes ago. I wanted to treat it kind of like the Civil War itself in this book – it’s this big, ugly, horrible thing, but it’s reality and we’re stuck in it, and the first thing we have to think about is survival. Calvin and Flynn aren’t going to change their society’s perceptions of gay people any more than they can end the Civil War on their own. They can run from the war, but the war is still there. They can change the minds of maybe a handful of people at best, but they can’t change the world. It’s just not that kind of a story.

That said, I didn’t want that reality to make the whole book dour, and I didn’t want to make them being gay the entire focus of the book. It’s about them and their relationship and their journey and their path to a new life – all that other stuff is there but the focus is always narrow on Flynn and Calvin.

Anyway, since coming out wasn’t really a thing someone could do in 1863 I thought it would be interesting to have a scene where Flynn tells Calvin about when he was first really honest with himself about who he was. They can’t come out the way we think of it, not ever, but they can be honest and truthful with themselves and accept that part about themselves - ‘stop pretending’ as I said throughout the book. And going back to what I was just saying, that has to be enough for them, and they have to make peace with that. Not the happiest thing in the world, but reality.

If I remember correctly I only use the word ‘gay’ twice in the entire book, and no character ever says it since that word didn’t mean what it does now in 1863. Instead Flynn uses the same word that the preacher used when he was growing up, the blunt ‘homosexual.’ Anyway, the story with Flynn ‘coming out’ to his reflection in the mirror and getting Calvin to do the same in the reflection of the water was one of those scenes I had in my mind for this story before I filled in all the other details and I thought it was important to include. I also personally liked Calvin’s monologue about space sailors and their place on the river; I feel like it’s almost a kind of thesis statement for what I was trying to do with this portion of the story. It also neatly ties together the two biggest motifs I had running through this novel: the importance of rivers and the ubiquity of the moon. Plus the line “I think real-life space sailors will float across the Ocean of Storms up there, walk on the Sea of Tranquility before that happens” is a direct reference to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility, which happened just weeks after the Stonewall riot. Anyway, I liked the writing in this scene and I’m happy with it!

Sex scene next. I feel like that’s the weakest part of my writing, to be honest. Probably because I don’t have much experience writing porn and I do have a good bit of experience writing… pretty much everything else. But that’s why we practice, to get better!

Scene after that is Calvin confronting Cletus about what he saw when Calvin kissed Flynn. I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes that I knew Cletus’s name was a bit silly but that there was a reason for it, and this is pretty much it. The chapter’s title, “Panta Rhei,” is referring to one of the themes I wanted to run through the book: constant change. It means “everything flows” and is probably the best known aphorism of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He is also known for the phrase “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I felt that worked pretty well with what I was going for in this book with the motif of the river and I wanted to include it in a way.

I have a bad habit of inserting meaning into character names in some of my writing, and I avoided it for the most part in this book but I kind of went wild with Cletus, ha. As you may have guessed since Cletus says the above phrase pretty much verbatim to Calvin, the heron Cletus is referencing Heraclitus. As a bonus, his name could also be written “C. Heron” since “Heron” is his actual last name, and that looks a lot like “Charon,” the ferryman in Greek mythology who carries the souls of the dead across the River Styx, but only if they pay him for passage. Anyway, once I started putting all the pieces together I was like ‘yeah, this is happening, the flatboat driver is gonna be a heron named Cletus, it fits too well,’ lol. It also worked out pretty good because, as I mentioned before, there are no actual supernatural events in this book, but with his wildly different physiology from other characters as the only avian in the book, his ability to go without sleep for days at a time, and his general aloof and duplicitous demeanor I felt he was a character whose true nature and intent would always be kind of mysterious for the reader, and that’s what I wanted.

After that we skip ahead several weeks to their arrival in Cairo. The start is a reference to the Book of Job 40:15-24 in the Bible that describes the river monster Behemoth, which I felt was appropriate in describing the ironclads at anchor in the river. I spent some time tying up the events from the past weeks and making it clear that the foxes and Calvin and Flynn were on good terms now to put a period on Jonathan’s character arc.

The very end of the chapter sets up the next few chapters, of course. The steamboat Sultana disaster has always intrigued me; such an enormous disaster, yet so few people today are aware of it. I wanted to include the last line of Flynn reading the name ‘Sultana’ and just leave it there in case any readers were aware of it so that it would be kind of an ‘oh shit’ moment. If not that was fine too because I explain all of that stuff in the next few chapters, but still.

And I’ll talk about that more when I dive into the writing notes for the next chapter, I reckon!

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS


The character of Jonathan, introduced in this chapter, is the oldest character in this book. Of course I don’t mean his age in the story, I mean that in terms of characters I’ve had in my mind. Long before I thought of Flynn or Calvin, their journey or this story at all, there was Jonathan.

I had an idea years and years ago for a story I thought might make a good novel. Basically the idea was that it would be an inversion of John Bunyan’s 1678 work “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” That work is a religious text in which the protagonist travels from his home, the City of Destruction, on a journey of salvation to the Celestial City. Along the way he meets many people and has many adventures, but the overarching idea of the book is that the protagonist stays on the good, godly road and finds salvation.

My idea was that Jonathan would go on a journey of his own, only this journey would start with someone who has been religious their whole life and is convinced that this is the truth, having never been challenged or confronted about some of the more disturbing elements of their faith. He’d be forced from his comfortable home and idyllic life by some outside force or conflict or trouble that he had to escape from. The adventures Jonathan would have along the way wouldn’t reinforce what he’d thought to be true his entire life, but rather they would, one by one, challenge the notions that he’d held onto since childhood and accepted without critical thought. He’d meet people he’d been told were evil who would help him, save him, become his friends. Over the course of the story he would come to realize that so much of what he’d believed for so long was wrong, and by the time he reached his own “Celestial City” he would be a changed man.

Never wrote that story! Never wrote it for a lot of reasons. I didn’t feel I could do it justice, in the first place, since my knowledge on the subject isn’t to the point where I feel it would need to be to produce something like that. I’m not religious and never have been; I have always been interested in religion from a kind of social and historical perspective but I feel like the person who could write a story like that for real would need to be a theologian or something like that, which I am not! In the second place, I didn’t (and don’t) feel like I have the writing chops to even attempt something like that without making it sound preachy, or presumptuous, or condescending, or any of a hundred other pitfalls a writer can fall into when attempting a project like that. And in the third place, I didn’t feel like I could make it fun to read! Social commentary is fine, but if the reader is bored it literally doesn’t matter at all. I kind of feel that way about all writing, honestly… probably from all the lessons drilled into me from the time I was working as a journalist where being concise is hugely important. If the reader isn’t having fun in a work of fiction, why should they stick with it? Why would you expect them to? Don’t waste their time!

Don’t waste their time… perfect segueway for me to finish this tangent and actually start talking about the chapter! Lol

I thought the best way to frame Jonathan and Emily before they meet Calvin and Flynn was by starting the chapter on them. This is the first time I break entirely from either Calvin or Flynn in the book, and I only do it once more (not counting the epilogue), at the beginning of chapter 10 with the Nix’s. In other examples where the focus starts on another character and follows them – and really even the example in chapter 10, albeit a little afterward – it then intersects immediately with Calvin and Flynn and their journey. Not here. The framing anecdote with Jonathan and Emily hiding in the elderly skunk’s crawlspace takes place almost a month before their story and Calvin and Flynn’s story intersect.

I didn’t even think about it at the time, but I think the reason I did this was because Jonathan IS such an old character for me and I wanted him to have legs, so to speak. I’m never going to write that Pilgrim’s Progress inversion story, but I felt like I could at least embed it into this one. I feel like now, that story is kind of contained within the larger narrative of Blue and Gray in a way. Richmond is the City of Destruction, New Orleans is the Celestial City, and the change that happens in Jonathan’s heart is caused by his interactions with Calvin and Flynn. In my mind there’s a full story there and we’re just seeing part of it, that brief window when the foxes’ story meets up with, runs along with, and then once again departs from Calvin and Flynn’s story that we are following. I think it’s good to think of your supporting characters in that way in general because if YOU as a writer believe they have lives outside of their role in the story, it gets reflected in the writing and it ends up adding depth, but in this case it’s absolutely true.

I guess I should also make the note that when I say “Jonathan” I’m talking about Emily too. In Pilgrim’s Progress it’s one character, but I thought splitting the elements of that character into two would make for a better narrative. Emily is the religious side of that meta-character, but also the willingness to change, whereas Jonathan is the stubborn, obstinate, set-in-his ways traditionalist whose mind is closed but gradually opens up. I dunno, I felt it just played better with that meta-character as a couple rather than just one person, as a kind of contrast or mirror image or something to Calvin and Flynn. I just thought it worked better that way.

Also as an aside, Emily mentions “Pastor Bunyan” a couple times. His name and Jonathan’s were kind of my direct nod to the origin of Emily and Jonathan’s characters in John Bunyan’s work.

Funny thing: Emily’s original name was “Sarah” and I wrote the entire chapter with that as her name. Then I oofed hard when I realized the names Jon and Sarah Turner sounded like they were going to be fighting Terminators after SkyNet kicked off Judgment Day and I had to change Sarah to Emily. I was actually kind of worried I would call her “Sarah” later in the book but I don’t think I did. I hope I didn’t!

Anyway, once I finish with the anecdote of Jonathan and Emily escaping from the Confederate Homeguard, I start up again to place them on the flatboat. I also introduce the heron Cletus here, but I try to keep the entirety of the situation a little mysterious until we rejoin with our protagonists again.

Sidenote: I realize how silly Cletus’s name is, but there’s a reason I named him that. I think next chapters writing notes are a better place for that though.

When we do rejoin with Flynn and Calvin, I spend a little time introducing the reader to what a flatboat is and what it’s all about. History lesson! I figure that’s not really common knowledge and I can’t just dump it on the reader and expect them to know about it, and I really NEED them to understand it because we’re going to be spending the next 2 and a half chapters on one of the things, ha.

I tend to do a lot of planning before I actually write things out, and that’s true to a greater degree in this story than in anything I’ve ever written since it’s so much longer. That said, things still pop up that work in ways I hadn’t been planning. One of those things was the fact that Flynn and Calvin arrive in Pittsburgh on the 4th of July. I didn’t even realize it until I started actually writing this chapter, but once I did I thought it would be a great way for them to slip through the city to the docks without standing out too much. I also thought it would be a great way to introduce the reader to Calvin’s PTSD flashbacks, this one brought on by fireworks. Like I mentioned in the writing notes for the previous chapter, Calvin might be big and strong, but he’s not nearly as mentally tough as Flynn. Him getting past the horrible things that happened to him in the war, no longer having nightmares and recovering from PTSD is a subplot I wanted to explore, and these flashbacks are something that pops back up in more stressful situations a couple times later in the book. I thought this would give me a chance to introduce them so that they don’t come out of nowhere later on when lives are on the line.

When Calvin and Flynn get to the docks Cletus recognizes them as deserters right away. This was so they didn’t really have the option of turning back, more than anything; Cletus wasn’t gonna tattle on them but as he points out, if he could figure them out so quick they’d be found out by someone sooner rather than later if they didn’t commit to something fast.

I didn’t reveal about Calvin and the money he had from soldiering until here because it wasn’t relevant until they needed passage on the flatboat. I did include the cigar case he used to keep his money in in chapter 3 though, when Calvin stripped the dead Confederate soldier and had to make sure he didn’t leave it behind. Didn’t elaborate on what it was or why it was important, but it was there. Flynn of course had no money, and even if he did Confederate money would be worthless. Also I felt like the fact that Calvin was ready, immediately, to spend almost a year’s wages for Flynn showed that he was serious about their budding relationship.

They get to know Jonathan and Emily, Jonathan has his suspicions about them, kind of just a needed setup and not much to say there.

I wanted to use the scene after that where they go back to their bunk to bring Edward back into the story. He dies early in the book, of course, but I think of him (or at least the memory of him) as a major character in the story. He was Flynn’s best and only real friend for Flynn’s entire life up until he met Calvin, and at this point in the story he’s only just died, so I wanted to make sure I included some stuff about how Flynn is grieving for him. It’s a weird place Flynn is in, the high of Calvin and everything about him mixed with the loss of his best friend. I wanted that to be made a little clearer for the reader. Like I said Edward is an important character in the story, very special to Flynn, and I made sure to at least mention him in every chapter of the book.

Skipped ahead a few weeks here for the chapter’s sex scene. I could have set this one anywhere on the river between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but I chose to set it in Wayne County, West Virginia as a kind of reference and nod to the novel ‘Addiction’ by Rufus01 on SoFurry. I read it last year and in a way it inspired me to get back into writing and, ultimately, to write ‘Blue and Gray.’ It impressed me that someone would write something of that length and of that quality with no expectation of getting published. I think one of the hangups that kept me from writing for a long time was that I thought I needed a perfect idea and that I needed to write to get published. When I read ‘Addiction’ it kind of clicked for me that it was okay to just write for the sake of writing and produce something that I wanted to write, just for me, without worrying about getting published. Anyway, I thought setting this scene in the same county where his story takes place would be a nice way to acknowledge that!

Sex scene… what can I say? It’s a sex scene! Haha. Through the story I kind of try to make them go further with each other and get more comfortable with each other in each successive sex scene, so you can figure out where we are, lol.

Didn’t want to end the chapter on the sex scene, and also I wanted this conversation about the moon and connecting with loved ones far away to happen this chapter. It was actually one of the earlier scenes I figured out when I was outlining the story, and it comes back later in the book; the names of chapters 9 and 10 are callbacks to this conversation, and looking at the moon in chapter 10 is kind of the moment where Calvin truly stops fighting once and for all. Plus I just think it’s neat. Today we can just send a text or make a phone call or anything to be connected with anyone instantly, but that’s a really new development, and for most of history if you were physically distant from a loved one you might as well be… well, on the moon. The idea that you can be so far apart and still be looking at the same thing in a time when communication is primitive when compared to today is something I like and wanted to include.

And of course we end with Calvin telling Flynn he loves him. Naive? Maybe. But they are kind of naive together and figuring all this out together as they go. That’s how I look at it anyway!

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Funny story: the title of this chapter is actually a title for a novel concept I had in my head years ago but never fleshed out. It’s a line from Beowulf referring to the monster Grendel, and the idea would have been something about a misunderstood werewolf who lives deep in the woods and is hunted like a monster, but is actually protecting the village from a real threat. I dunno, I never got far with that and don’t think I ever will, so I used it for the chapter title. The misunderstood werewolf is Calvin, I guess!

I started the chapter with Flynn telling Calvin to leave the Confederate jacket behind and let the forest have it because I thought it would kind of put emphasis on how much he hated the Confederacy, both for what it stands for and for getting Edward killed. I touched on it in the last chapter of course, but like I said in the previous chapter’s writing notes I didn’t feel like I could devote a lot of space to it given the other things I wanted to focus on. I thought that the symbolism of Flynn – who loves clothing and for whom clothing plays a major part in his life – voluntarily abandoning the Confederate jacket kind of reinforced it without having to use too much real estate. Maybe not. That was the intent though.

Ah, chapter 5 is where the sex starts!

So mostly I wanted their sexual experiences in this chapter to be awkward and clumsy but extremely passionate. In the novel both Calvin and Flynn are 21 years old, but this story isn’t taking place today. Flynn has literally never met another gay guy in his life, and Calvin’s only experience with a guy was really minuscule and really bad. Of course they’d have a lot more experience in a modern setting, but in the 1860s, when they couldn’t tell anyone they were gay and no one told them, I didn’t think it’d be unreasonable for gay guys their age to have never found anyone else. But now that they have, even though they are in a dangerous situation and Flynn has a bum leg, they still can’t contain themselves even though neither of them really knows what they are doing. That’s what I was going for in the writing for the first scene where they jizz their pants, ha.

The next scene was meant to be a bit more romantic, what with the water and the rain and all, haha. But I also needed that scene to establish that Calvin couldn’t swim and that he was deathly afraid of water, for Flynn to teach him to float, for them to really get to know each other better. I also have a good bit that I throw back to in later chapters for scenes that involve swimming, almost drowning, etc., and the theme that the act of fighting itself is causing a lot of Calvin’s problems is reinforced here.

I also wanted to give Flynn a chance to shine here. Throughout the novel I try to make it so that the strengths and weaknesses of Calvin and Flynn kind of play off each other so that together they can accomplish anything. Calvin is big and strong, but Flynn is a lot tougher mentally than Calvin is. Calvin can’t swim, Flynn is great at it. Flynn can’t ride a horse but Calvin is an expert. I dunno, one thing I didn’t want to happen was for Calvin to just be a white knight in shining armor saving Flynn all the time. That’s trash! Flynn is strong too, just in different ways. I was kind of afraid though that since Calvin is meant to be very strong and physically capable, and Flynn is much smaller and spends half the novel injured, that that would end up happening. Jumping waaaaay forward, but that’s a big reason I wanted them to have the roles they do in the epilogue, with Flynn’s skills really being the foundation for the life they will live together “happily ever after.”

Anyway, yeah, the scene after they get out of the water is meant to be more hot whereas the one earlier is more meant to be more cute, I guess. It’s meant to kind of be a magical moment for both of them since it’s the first time either of them has really had any kind of real sexual experience, and they both think back to it a few times throughout the book. Did the reader get that out of the scene? Don’t know! But that was what I was going for.

The last bit is mostly just to set up the next few chapters of the book where they are on the flatboat, and of course I had to end the chapter the same way it started, a tacit rejection of the Confederacy by Flynn. Did I mention that I worried I didn’t spend enough space reinforcing that? Haha.

Seriously though one of my biggest fears when I started this project was that the reader would just look at Flynn and be like ‘a Confederate soldier? Fuck him!’ I didn’t expressly devote thousands of words to him rejecting his old life and the Confederacy, but my hope is that through all the little things throughout the novel the reader understands how he feels and who he is.

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS



I haven’t forgotten about doing these, just felt it was more important to actually work on projects, ha. I’m between major projects now though, so I can finish up on these.

For the first few chapters of the book I thought I would have all the chapter names contain either place names or geographical features. I actually did that through most of the chapters of the book, but there are a few where I didn’t stick to this convention. For this chapter I thought ‘cataract’ was good since both the word’s meanings worked pretty well to describe where we are in the story.

This chapter is mostly character-building and defining the relationship between Calvin and Flynn, since it kind of lays the groundwork for why they have to run, why they run together, etc., so there’s a lot of expository stuff in the dialogue in this chapter, much more so than in later chapters.

The initial dream sequence with Flynn actually took me a bit of time to write. There aren’t any actual supernatural elements to this story, but I kind of wanted a thread of it to tie in with the themes of the river and the passage of time that I put into the story, and like some of the anecdotes in chapter one I thought this would be something to be able to call back to later in the story. I also thought the contrast of the warm ‘blue’ at the water’s surface contrasted well with the cold ‘gray’ of the deep. I also wanted Edward to be a character that stays with the story for the duration of the novel because he was so important to Flynn, even though he dies early on. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the dream sequence.

It also took a bit of trial and error to get Flynn to warm to Calvin in a way that I felt was organic and not forced. Obviously you go into a project like this knowing that they’re going to end up together, but when Flynn wakes up his last memory is of Calvin almost killing him, and walking from that to their first kiss was something that I knew would be difficult.

I’m not 100% satisfied with everything in this chapter, but I think to get to the point where I would have been totally satisfied would have required substantially more space than I was willing to devote to this portion of the story. That is to say, I knew where the rest of the story would go, and I wanted the finished product to ideally be between 90k and 120k words, so you can’t always chase all the rabbits down all the holes you’d like to. That’s the case in some other portions of the novel, as well, but this area is one of the biggies.

On that note, I probably could have gone into more detail about Flynn’s regret for serving in the Confederate army. I mean, I know I could have – I used it as an emotional moment in this chapter, but honestly I wish I had been able to follow it further later on in the book. It felt like that arc kind of resolved itself at the end of this chapter though with Flynn’s insistence on leaving with Calvin, reinforced early in the next chapter which I’ll talk about then. Still, it was a thread I wish I could have explored a little deeper later down the line in their journey.

Another thing I wanted to highlight early in the interactions between Calvin and Flynn was that Calvin was basically ready to give up on life at the time, sick with himself for the things that he had done, suffering from PTSD, etc. Flynn healing him of that is a thread I do spend a lot of time with throughout the book and I wanted to highlight it early.

Throughout the book I tried to make events follow as closely as possible with historical events, but I had to make some exceptions in a few places for the sake of the narrative. The biggest deviation in the book probably takes place in this chapter. In real life the battle of Gettysburg went on for several days, and Confederates didn’t begin to retreat until around July 4 or 5. I really, really didn’t want Calvin to stick around a Confederate camp that long though; again, I could have made it work, but I didn’t feel like I could justify devoting the amount of space to it as I thought it would require without inflating the overall novel word count. And if I couldn’t do that, I felt like having them stay there would screw up the pacing for some of the other stuff I wanted to do after they left. I made the decision (eventually) to just truncate the battle’s timeline, which I felt was an acceptable compromise given that none of the events in the book revolve around the actual battle. So, as a result, Calvin and Flynn’s flight from Chambersburg takes place the same day they meet. Not a perfect solution, but one I felt was good enough. Sometimes that’s what you gotta do!

I think I mentioned it in the previous writing notes, but I included Sgt. Thayer into this as a kind of minor antagonist to add a little more pressure for them to leave in the present but also to contrast with the novel’s major antagonist introduced in a few chapters. I also had the scene of the showdown between him and Calvin in mind, an early chance to prove that Calvin is serious about not wanting to resort to violence any more.

The kiss between Calvin and Flynn is the culmination of the chapter and a kind of a prelude to the much, much steamier content that starts in the next chapter and continues throughout the book. Yeah, it took five chapters to get there, but as I have said before I wrote this just to be the type of book I personally would like to read. In a way I was worried about losing readers before then, especially in this exposition-heavy chapter, but I hope that for those who stuck around this long and were expecting a lot of erotic content that all the back-story makes the erotic content more satisfying. That’s the theory anyway! :]

As I mentioned when I first started posting chapters for Blue and Gray, there might be some delays for the later chapters since I still hadn't finished writing the epilogue at that point and the last few chapters were still kind of a mess from an editing standpoint.

Well, unfortunately that's still mostly the case! Without getting too specific, my regular 9-5 work has been kicking my ass for the past few months and I really haven't been able to devote the time I wanted to finishing things up. So yeah, it might be a few weeks before I post chapter 8, I'm sorry to say. Chapter 8 itself is pretty much ready to roll, but the story is at a good 'pause' point at the end of chapter 7 and I really want to make more progress on the end of the novel before Flynn and Calvin get off the flatboat and start the next stage of their journey. I wish I didn't need this extra time but the end of the novel is not quite where I want it to be, and I don't want to rush it, I want to focus on making it right even if it takes a little longer. Sorry about that!

In brighter news, I commissioned some ref sheets for Calvin and Flynn from a really fantastic artist and I'll be posting those soon! I do plan on commissioning a few pieces of art of a few scenes I really liked, but I think I am going to wait until the story is finished and posted before I do that.

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS


Unorganized thoughts, that's pretty much what these notes are.

I started the chapter the way I did kind of as a bridge to chapter 2. I guess I should say, I described the way Calvin struck Flynn in chapter 2 as 'like a steam hammer' specifically because I wanted to use the metaphor I did to start this chapter. I just thought it was neat!

I felt like it was also a good way to describe the way the war had changed him to set up talking about his PTSD, his "Nostalgia" as it was called during the Civil War. The passage about how his PTSD developed -- him killing the badger as he was running away from him -- is very important both to understanding his character and his actions later in the book. *Throughout* the book, I should say, since his PTSD is something he has to deal with throughout the novel. Heck, it's important in explaining his actions when he first sees Flynn. Anyway, I wanted to get his part right and I spent a good bit of time working on the first few thousand words of this chapter. Hopefully that comes through.

I also didn't mention Calvin's name at all in chapter 2 since it was told entirely from Flynn's perspective. Likewise, Flynn's name isn't mentioned at all in chapter 3 until Calvin learns his name.

For the actual confrontation between Flynn and Calvin from Calvin's point of view, I wanted to make sure first and foremost that all the actions lined up perfectly between chapters 2 and 3. This ended up being a little more time consuming than I thought it would be! I was constantly flipping back and forth while I was writing this. Lesson learned.

Going back to Calvin's PTSD, it actually took me a while to figure out how to get from the beginning of this chapter to the point where Calvin is intent on saving Flynn. To take a step back, the way I typically write isn't with a 'first draft' and a rough draft' and all that; when I actually start writing, there's usually not much rewriting or editing that needs to be done. All that work, for me, is done in the outlining. So when I was outlining/storyboarding this part of the story, I really struggled to figure out how the heck to get Flynn on Calvin's horse from a motivational standpoint. I actually went through about half a dozen other ideas before I settled on this one, which I felt worked the best because it not only provided the best motive I could think of for Calvin to save Flynn, but also it deepened his personality a bunch, I think. I dunno, I didn't really like a lot of the other ideas I thought of first, but this one just felt like it worked, and it also helped to tie together a lot of the events I had in my head when I was first outlining.

Couple things on the actual confrontation, I wanted the anecdote from chapter 1 with Calvin saving the feral deer to be directly evoked in both it and the moment he killed the badger, kind of culminating when he sees the same face in Flynn and averting the action he would have otherwise taken. Related to his PTSD, Calvin trying to redeem himself is an ongoing theme, and not killing Flynn is kind of the first step on his journey to redemption, among other things. It's implied here, and a little more heavily later in the book, that Calvin was kind of on a knife edge at this moment, and that if he had killed Flynn he also would have died, doomed and unredeemed.

Calvin cries for the only time in the novel here too, right after he knocks out Flynn. I thought that was a good contrast to Flynn who pretty much cries in almost every chapter, ha. He's just an emotional boy, don't hate on him!

I had to go back and re-edit pretty much the entire sequence following the inciting incident to make sure I got some details right for things that come up later in the book, some in chapter 4, some much later on. I won't mention those details but they're there.

After Calvin gets to Carlisle and then departs into the woods I added that he was "carving his own Appalachian trail." I know that phrase was shoehorned in awkwardly, but I wanted to include it. I'm an avid hiker in real life and one of my bucket list items is to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. I've done some sections before but never spent more than about half a week on it at a time. Anyway, the AT runs right by Carlisle in real life, between it and where the Skirmish of Sporting Hill took place. I didn't realize that when I started writing but I thought it was neat enough to warrant a nod, ha.

Also, while talking about hiking, the portion earlier in the chapter where I talk about Calvin getting a feeling he wasn't alone after hours in the woods by himself... I added that because from my experience that's a real thing. Like, I seriously can't tell you how many times I've been hiking alone for hours and then I just FEEL like someone is watching me, or that I'm not alone any more, and every time it's happened I end up seeing someone else not long afterwards. Can't explain it!

The chapter title, clearly, is a reference to Caesar crossing the Rubicon, that point of no return. I added that Calvin cast his die and that he yelled 'hail' to get the attention of the Confederate guards as a sort of reinforcement of that nod. Also the Rubicon is a river, and rivers play a huge role in this novel both narratively and symbolically, so I thought it was a good fit.

The first confrontation between Calvin and Thayer was meant to be both a little tense and a little disjointed. Calvin has no experience lying or deceiving (and is really bad at it, which comes back in the narrative several times later in the novel), and Thayer is overeager but also inexperienced. I also wanted Thayer to be a kind of semi-inept proto-villain to frame... well, a much more cunning and dangerous villain that appears later in the novel. I'll leave it there.

I wish I knew more about medicine or doctoring, because I feel like that would have made the scene where Dr. Russell treats Flynn more believable. Sadly I don't, and although I did a bit of research here I kept getting conflicting information. I'm not entirely satisfied with how I described him treating Flynn, but I guess if that's the worst thing I can think of about this chapter that's pretty good.

Dr. Russell's mindset and some of the things he says to Calvin, while serving the immediate purpose of giving him confidence in what he is doind, are also kind of meant to be a guidepost for some of the lessons Flynn and Calvin will learn by the time their journey is over and some of the personal growth they will both accomplish. He's kind of a 'chaotic good' while Thayer is a kind of 'lawful evil,' and I kind of liked the contrast in their personalities.

I ended the chapter on a bit of a cliffhanger, showing that Calvin is in more danger than he might realize, while also trying to deepen that 'lawful evil' character of Thayer. I also wanted to show a but of his commanding officer, who regards him as fairly inept; again, this is partly to serve as a contrast between Thayer and another far worse villain later on.

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS


Chapter 2 is the shortest chapter in the book. I thought about adding some more to it to fill it out a bit, but after a while I kind of realized that I'd done what I felt like I needed to do with the chapter and that it was okay to leave it a bit shorter than the rest. One thing I focus on in writing is not wasting the reader's time. Taking a tangent, going down a side road with your writing can be okay if it is done in service of the overall narrative, but you should never write "filler." In service of the narrative can be as simple as fleshing out a character, adding background to help the reader understand something, creating a mood, etc., but there should always be a purpose. This is most of why I included the interactions between Flynn and Edward, to further establish their friendship and close bond so that when he was killed the reader would feel how devastating it was for Flynn.

In the writing notes for the last chapter I talked a little about my background as a journalist and an editor for news publications, and I think this is where that instinct comes from. You never, ever waste the reader's time in news copy, you're always looking to cut out unnecessary words or phrases or sections. I dunno, fiction is a different ball game but I still read stuff in that way. I think that might make for a narrative that moves too fast in some places, which is kind of how I felt about this chapter, but I couldn't think of any way to stretch it out in an organic way.

I spent some time at the beginning talking about the history and effects of the Minie ball because it plays a role early in the story. Actually, I guess it plays a role through the entire book, since Flynn's gunshot wound isn't something that just goes away or heals quickly. But I thought it was important enough to the story that the reader should have a little background on it.

The churchyard that Flynn and Edward spend the night sleeping on is intended to be the same church that Calvin had his awkward experience with J.R. years prior. I didn't explicitly state that, but it's in the same town and I mentioned that the officers requisitioned the Lutheran church rectory, so I was hoping that was enough.

The letter that Edward gave Flynn... it makes an appearance in the next chapter but after that you won't see it for a while, but trust that I didn't forget about it. Same goes for the passage in the first portion where I mentioned Edward's fiance again and added a little background for her.

- -

The Skirmish of Sporting Hill was a real encounter that took place on June 30, 1863:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirm....._Sporting_Hill

I tried to keep the experience of Flynn and Edward fairly close to the real events of the skirmish. Specifically, the scene where they went to the barn for cover but the barn was immediately destroyed by the first artillery shot was how the real skirmish happened. 16 Confederate soldiers were killed, while no Union soldiers were. It was also the furthest north the Army of Northen Virginia ever got, and while I was writing it I realized that this could have made Edward the northernmost Confederate casualty of the entire Civil War, but I decided not to include that.

In real life the foundation of that barn (the Eberly barn) is still there. Now the site where this skirmish took place is an apartment complex called "The Brambles." It's a stone's throw from a Denny's, a TGI Friday's and a Dunkin' Donuts. Here's where I'm talking about:

https://goo.gl/maps/ZJTXrCHLRtypVgNe8

I dunno, maybe it's just a me thing, but I find stuff like that really interesting. There was a real skirmish there, people really died, lives really shattered -- now you can get greasy food, a Dunkicino and free wifi across the street. It's a feeling I get when I think about stuff like that. Time keeps on moving, people forget, but everywhere you go, even seemingly the most mundane places have stories, events and dramas that happened there that no one remembers. It's all there, just buried. I think about that stuff all the time.

Anyway, I thought having the inciting incident occur during a forgotten skirmish rather than during the actual Battle of Gettysburg might be a little unexpected for the reader since I had built up the battle, and I expected the reader to already be familiar with it in some way, even if only the name. I wanted the start of it to be as surprising an unexpected as possible, which is why I made it start during friendly banter between Edward and Flynn. I also wanted Edward's death to be as sudden, brutal and unexpected as possible to kind of drive home some of the themes I'm going for in the novel as a whole.

The scene after Flynn is shot and lying on the ground kind of highlights some of the personality traits he has that he struggles to overcome throughout the book. He was following Edward until Edward was killed and imagines his voice telling him to do something when he is wounded. He remembered what his father told him (even though he hates him) about the tourniquet, which saves his life, but ultimately also remembers what his father told him to do in shooting the wolf, which almost kills him. Flynn is always looking for someone stronger than himself, someone to tell him what to do, someone to protect him and watch over him. His personality is rather passive, and through the book he struggles to take more control when he has too. *When he has to*, note. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about that kind of personality, I don't mean to say that, but there are times when everyone has to make a tough decision and act on their own. That's what I mean. Just like, if someone is too *aggressive* or *assertive* that can be a big personality fault too; there are times when you have to step back, give up control, let someone else take the reins. I just meant that Flynn has issues taking charge when he really, really needs to, and is quick to latch onto those he sees as strong, competent, etc., and you see that here.

The actual encounter between Flynn and Calvin, I'll probably go into that more in the next section of writing notes, since the above is pretty much what I wanted to say about the encounter from Flynn's perspective.

Before I get into talking about writing, I want to talk about WHY I wrote Blue and Gray.

I spent many years working in journalism, both as a reporter and as an editor. You can probably see the echoes of that in my writing; I'm a lot better at writing about events and chronologies than I am writing about characters and emotions. Most of my experience with writing has been taking mountains of information, gleaning the important bits out and distilling it down into paragraphs and articles that are easy understood by as many people as possible. I'm good at that. While that's a useful skill to have for writing in general, its applications in writing fiction are limited. This novel then, more than anything, is me trying to unlearn a lot of the writing techniques that were hammered into my brain for so many years so that I can actually produce fiction at the level I aspire to be able to. I'm not there yet, and I know that, but I'm learning.

For a long time I HAVE aspired to write fiction, but I never took that first step. I was waiting for that one 'great idea' to produce a 'masterpiece', but of course that idea never came. That's not how it works for anything; the dude who runs around the block a few nights a week isn't going to be competing in the Olympics next summer. It's ridiculous. But that's how a lot of people view writing, I think. I know I did. But at some point I realized that my expectations were absurd and that if I was ever going to produce anything I had to just START WRITING. So I did.

To make sure I didn't get in the mindset of trying to produce that unicorn 'masterpiece' I decided to write something that I expressly knew would have absolutely no commercial value, but make it as good as I possibly could. I decided to write a story that I personally would want to read, not caring about if it had any chance of finding an audience or commercial success. Something so niche -- an erotic gay furry romance adventure novel in a meticulously researched historical setting -- that it was pretty much guaranteed that almost no one would read it. But if they did, IF they managed to find it and were into it, I wanted to give them the best goddamn erotic gay furry historical romance adventure novel on the fucking planet.

Getting into that mindset really allowed me to just do the damn thing. In a couple months I had a really solid and fully fleshed out outline for the entire novel. That was actually the hardest part. Saying 'I'm going to write a novel' feels daunting, but once I started writing it all flowed pretty easily. I set some easily achievable word count goals and one day I looked up and had 50,000 words on page and realized Jesus, this is really happening. I'm writing a novel. Maybe no one will ever read it, but I'm writing a fucking novel. And I'm proud of it.

Anyway, I've learned a lot about this process from writing Blue and Gray. That's most of what I am exploring with these writing notes: talking about what I did and why I did it, figuring out what worked, what didn't and why. It's all experience and knowledge I can use in the future.

I haven't looked past this book yet, but if I do continue on this path I think the next one WILL actually be something meant for commercial consumption. Or maybe I'll write another one like this one, just for fun with no other purpose, or maybe this will be the only long work I ever write. I don't know. That's a long way off, I haven't thought that far ahead yet. Let's just talk about this one. :]

- -

SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK.

My goal for the first chapter was to present the exposition in an efficient manner. For this, I settled on writing a series of short anecdotes about the childhood and teenage years of both of the main characters, Calvin Riley and Flynn Harrison. I tried to highlight some of their most distinctive personality traits through some of these interactions as well as set the stage for some of the events that would occur later in the book.

The first anecdote then is pretty obviously setting up what happens to Flynn in chapter 2. He doesn't want to shoot the wolf but forces outside his control are forcing him to do it. He misses and things fall to shit.

You also see some of the exact dialogue his father speaks in this section return in chapter 2. This is something I do throughout the book; exact lines of dialogue or slightly altered lines of narration are repeated between chapters, sometimes spread far apart, with completely different meanings or connotations associated with them, and often signaling the beginning or end of SOMETHING. A LARGE amount of dialogue from chapter 1 is given this treatment in later chapters. An example of this is in chapter 2: one of the first things Edward says to Flynn when he is introduced is "Come on, we've got to get out of here." He says this to try to convince Flynn to run to the river with him, but these words are revisited in chapter two -- these were the last words he spoke before he died while waiting for Flynn to catch up to him as they were running for safety.

I'm actually a little worried I've overused this technique throughout the book to the point that it'll be seen as lazy rather than intentional, but who knows. You tell me!

A few of the larger themes/motifs of the book are also introduced in chapter 1, chiefly rivers, the moon, and traps/snares. There's a few more but those are probably the biggies.

Couple other things I needed to establish in this chapter too. One, both Calvin and Flynn needed to be unambiguously gay, that had to be set up early. Two, they needed VERY little incentive to try to return home once the events start rolling in chapters 2 and 3, especially Flynn. If there is are compelling reasons for them to look back we have a problem in the narrative. Probably a little lazy, but this is why both of them have mothers who are dead, no siblings, Calvin's father is dead and Flynn's father is an absolute unmitigated asshole. It's the best I could think of!

Couple other things I could probably go over but I think they're best left for the notes in later chapters, calling back to this rather than listing them all out, since like I said a shit ton of stuff throughout the book calls back to things in the first chapter and I don't want to put out TOO many spoilers here.

Last thing, I mentioned that the historical stuff in this book is meticulously researched, and I meant it. Again, that goes back to my background in journalism; research is fun to me, and trying to fit pieces of the plot into real historical events, places, etc. is like a fun little puzzle game. So for instance, the Pine Grove Iron Works is a real place in Cumberland County that was used in the 1840s and 1850s for iron smelting -- you can still visit the ruins of it. Applejack was a regional specialty in Pennsylvania during this time period, and the song "Lorena" is real, as are the lyrics, and it was very popular in real life at the time. The text of the conscription letter Edward received is the actual text from a real one with the dates, locations and names changed.

Point is, if at all possible I tried to make everything as historically accurate as I could throughout the novel unless I absolutely couldn't due to hard plot constraints, which does happen a couple times later in the book unfortunately. But honestly, to me this is big fun. I'm a dork like that. :]

That's all for now!

I'm getting close to finishing my first novel!

Overall the entire structure and plot of the book is finalized. It will consist of 9 chapters plus an epilogue, which will essentially be a 10th full chapter. I'd say each one averages 10,000 words, though there's at least one that is somewhat short and one that is a good bit longer than 10k words. As of today I am finishing up on chapter 8, so I really feel I am in the home stretch.

The real point of this journal entry is to say that I've decided that the manuscript will be in a state that I am ready to start posting chapters here and on other sites by next month. I'm planning on posting one chapter a week for 10 weeks starting July 11th! I feel like that will give me plenty of time; I may or may not be totally finished by the time July 11th rolls around, but if I post a chapter a week I should be able to finish up before I get to the later chapters. And if I have to delay a chapter by a week or two that is fine too, no big deal. I'm just super excited to start sharing this story.

So what's the story about?

If I had to describe it I'd say it's a historical furry gay erotic romance adventure novel. What a mouthful! I don't know if I can pin it down, it's kind of all of those at once. There's action, adventure, violence, betrayal, romance, suspense, sex -- plenty of sex actually, just not right away. It's not something written for broad commercial appeal or anything like that, and it's not for readers here who want a quick fix, since it takes several chapters until we get to the sex. At the end of the day it's the story I wanted to write, and if other people here like it that'd be awesome, but if not it's still something I'm proud of.

The title of the novel is "Blue and Gray." It takes place in an anthro version of the American Civil War, with most of the events taking place in the year 1863, though some occur in the years prior and some in the years after. The two main characters are a gray wolf from Pennsylvania named Calvin Riley and a blue-furred deer from an unnamed valley in the eastern Tennessee Appalachians named Flynn Harrison. It's a very narrowly focused story; I don't really touch on the politics of the war or anything like that. Without spoiling too much, it's the story of Flynn and Calvin, nothing more.

It actually feels weird writing their names here, if that makes sense. I had the initial idea for this story in December of last year and spent a couple months kind of just thinking about the story and mentally outlining who they were and where their story would go. Once I got most of the major plot elements nailed down I started working on the actual writing in February and have been making pretty consistent progress since then. As of right now the only places Flynn and Calvin exist are in my head and in a dozen or so Word documents, but they've been characters I've been thinking about and/or writing about just about every day for half a year, so I'm really psyched to be able to share them and their story with folks here soon!

I chose July 11th mostly because I'm going to be traveling and visiting friends and family for nearly two weeks before that. Seemed like as good a date as any, and now I have a hard deadline, which is always a great motivator for finishing a project :]

Getting back into writing was kind of a New Year's resolution for me, and the goal I set for myself was 500 words a day. Could be a short story, could be a longer project, could be something silly and just for fun that would never see the light of day, but the goal was to put a minimum of 500 words on a page every day.

I'm happy that I've been able to keep that up almost every day, and the days I haven't been able to have been days that I have either been traveling for work or busy all day with friends/family/etc. And that's cool, 500 words a day is an ideal and you can't write EVERY day, but it's a nice motivation. A lot of days I end up writing a good bit more than that, but some days it's good to have a goal in mind that is achievable even when you're not really feeling like doing it.

I've been focusing pretty solidly lately on the novel that I am writing. So far I am about 40,000 words into the manuscript, and if I had to guess I'd say the finished product will be around 100k to 120k words. That could change though.

Just for anyone who is curious, I don't like writing continuing series or things like that. I like to have the whole story arc planned out before I start writing something; there's a beginning, middle and end in my head before I begin, and I just have to figure out the details.

With that in mind, be aware that I don't want to post longer works until they are done, and I mean DONE. So if I post a "Chapter 1" of something, that means the whole thing is completely written, edited, ready to post.

I'm saying this because I have a handful of chapters that need some light editing but are pretty much finished. I don't plan on posting anything on this project until the whole thing is completed though. Hopefully I can get it done before the summer, but like I have said before this is something I'm kind of viewing as a hobby, just for fun, so I can't give a definitive date on when it'll be finished.

I may take a break and write some shorter stories before I finish up this project, but I'm having fun with this longer story now, so who knows!

Not too much to say about this one really. Mainly I need some practice on m/m stuff, and I thought I’d have some fun by trying to work in as many double-entendres as I could without it getting clunky. Like a kind of personal challenge. Maybe I didn’t succeed, the clunk was real? Ah well, pirates are fun.

Something that started to bug me but that I decided to leave in was a couple of anachronisms. One, the Royal Navy didn’t start naming ships of the line after Greek heroes until the late 1700s, but their naming convention in the early 1700s sucked. HMS Bellerophon sounds so much cooler than HMS Earl of Northumbria or whatever, right? So that stayed. Two, shot towers weren’t in widespread use (and hadn’t even been invented so far as I am aware) in 1719 -- that didn’t happen until, again, the late 1700s. It was too good of a vaguely period-friendly reference to horse schlong to pass up though. IT STAYS.

Beyond that, Calico Jack Rackham was, of course, a real pirate in 1719, and he did make a stop in Nassau that year. I tried to at least keep HIS timeline fairly centered. In real life he was named for his calico clothing, but I thought it would be fun to make an entire character out of a different usage of the word calico, which was kind of the original idea.

The real Calico Jack was also pretty famous for his exploits with women, having numerous lovers and even female crew members. I figured it wasn’t too much of a stretch if he had eyes for some of his male crew members, right? And maybe that he was a bit more flamboyant than any contemporaneous sources. It’s fiction, they're dead, we can do these things.

George Fetherston was also a real person. The real George Fetherston was 2nd in command on Calico Jack’s crew when they were finally captured in 1721, which is why I decided to end the story with his promotion. Also, you know, “first mate,” gotta work that one in.

In real life they were both executed for piracy on the same day in Kingston, Jamaica in 1721. So much for a happy ending!

If you liked the music check out some of Alestorm’s music videos like this one, they are just ridiculous, stupid fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r8jlHDBMsw

So yeah, like I mentioned in the description on the post this one was pretty much for me to practice a couple things I need to work on for a longer piece I’m working on. Things:

1) I really dislike writing violence, I have a strong aversion to it. I think depicting violence for its own sake is super tawdry.

That said, it’s sometimes necessary. If I think it is, I think it’s best to ask “is this in service of the narrative?” That is to say, how does this scene move the story forward to a place you want it to go? A lot of times it’s just going to be a way to “raise the stakes” and I think that’s fine. You can usually add import to a scene when physical/mortal danger is introduced into the narrative, and actually allowing those things to happen to characters conveys to the audience that you’re willing to “play for keeps,” that really bad things can happen to major characters in this narrative, and that kind of heightens things for all characters even if nothing bad ever really happens to them. That’s my opinion anyway!

Also, personally, it seems like every time I end up putting violence in a narrative it ends up being allegorical, the person doing it ends up getting punished and the whole episode highlights how violence just ends up making everything worse for everyone. I’m a sucker for happy endings at the end of the day. Part of why I’m not the best at writing stories like this… which is why I need to work on it! Even in this one, I intentionally left ambiguous what happened to Linda and the unnamed German Shepard. In my mind neither of them actually died, but it’s really up to the reader.

But yeah, to the first point I am kind of at the stage of the initial incident in what I’m working on right now, and I need to get past some unpleasant stuff to get to the happier stuff, so I’m trying to figure out the best way to work through that.

2) Music is a major source of inspiration for me, always has been. I heard the song referenced at the beginning of this short while I was at work on Tuesday and kind of storyboarded it in my head, so I thought I’d knock it out in a couple days while it was fresh on my mind. I thought I’d include it since I use music to kind of get in the right mindset for something I’m working on, and if it’s specific I thought it might be worth sharing. That’s something I plan to do more in the future but I’m trying to get a feel for how it’ll be received, or if anyone even gives a shit, ha.

3) The longer piece I’m writing is set in the American South during the Civil War, so I am trying to get a feel for writing both grittier scenes and incorporating Southern Gothic motifs, since I think that’s a skillset that’ll be helpful.


More general things:

1) For whatever reason most of what I write relies to some degree on place and time. I feel like it’s a great way to add both detail and an interesting setting without even really having to try too hard. Plus it lets me do research and learn about stuff, which is something I enjoy for its own sake.

2) I have a really awful habit of trying to worm meaning into character names, but I like doing it even though it’s a bad practice. Jimmy’s last name is Bonhomme because he’s from Louisiana, that name being the French version of the name Goodman, which is the joke because he’s a bad dude with a rude ‘tude. Hurr.

3) I don’t have a lot of experience writing anthro characters so I’m still trying to get a feel for how detailed I should be with character descriptions, when I should reiterate or emphasize physical traits… whether I can call them “people,” lol. It’s all good, I’ll figure it out.

That’s it for now!