Story Behind The Story: The Forgotten Fair

Ah, and here we are. The final SBTS for the final book in the series of adventures of Grace & Witherbloom. As with all of these, if you haven't read The Forgotten Fair, not a lot of this is going to make sense and it's going to be very spoiler-filled. So beware!

Plenty of time to turn back (or go to Amazon and get The Forgotten Fair!)...

All right, for those of you who are left, it's time to talk about the final adventure in the series. This one was an odd one for me. You see, I had in my mind a general idea about what I wanted to happen in the final adventure. For one thing, I'd written the premonition (or vision of the future via Bradford's psychochronal projector) that Wilhelmina had years before, as part of writing The Girl Who Died Backwards. So I knew that had to happen.

I also knew I wanted a walloping great big machine for the finale. Maybe that's cliche, but it also just felt right. After all of Ashmore's devices, I wanted the final device to be his most ambitious and daring. In the years between writing the first book and the last book, a thought had begun to form in my mind that the final book should take place during a World's Fair. I liked the symmetry of it. The first book would take place during the Great Exhibition and the final book would take place at a World's Fair. Now, the next event of that type would have been the Exposition Universelle in Paris, France in 1855. Now, a good amount of time passes between the first book and the last book, but not that much time. I could have extended the time that Helen was lost in the Emperor's universe, but I didn't want to stretch that too far, to be honest. Plus, I have to admit... I wanted the finale to take place in New York. In the new world. It just felt right for Ashmore to make that sort of dramatic gesture.

But, the World's Fair didn't take place in New York until 1939. But, that's easy to remedy, really, when you have a time-changing anachroanarchist like Ashmore around, right? Oh, and you know anachroanarchist? That was a term I had thought about refering to Ashmore as in the book. It doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it though? I think it's best I didn't go through with that. :) Alternate titles for the series at one point, by the way included "The Anachronica" or "The Anachroanarchist Devices" all of which would have been a bit silly and wordy. But, maybe there's some alternate universe out there where these books are called that.

But, I digress. I knew that I wanted Ashmore to go to New York. I knew I wanted a World's Fair to be taking place. And, it seemed natural that the big device be at the center of the fair. Everything began to take shape, and with it so did Ashmore's grand plan. Now, I just had to get them there.

Originally, Helen was going to tell Josiah her "origin" on the ship ride over to America. It was actually a real problem figuring out where to put her story, actually. Once I thought of the opening with Josiah disguising his identity and confronting Ashmore face to face, I knew that's how the story had to open. And I didn't think opening the story with a bit of exposition from Helen would work. Originally, her origin would have been a separate short story (like Josiah's was planned to be, originally) that would have been bundled with "The Other Key." But, I didn't really think Helen's story could stand on it's own as a complete tale, to be honest. Not for lack of interest in what is going on, but just that it didn't have enough meat to it. I could have gone in and filled in a lot of detail there and made it more of a separate story... but I liked the idea of not filling in too many of the details. And I also didn't want to kill any of the momentum of the story by going into the sidebar of back story for Helen.

I also had the issue that I wanted Ashmore to tell Allisa about who he was, too. So, essentially, Ashmore and Helen had the same thing to tell two different people. I really liked the idea of interspersing their stories together, and originally there was MUCH more back and forth between Helen telling Josiah her story and Ashmore telling Alissa his story. But it just became too much of a confusing jumble. And I think it robbed both moments of their power. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It avoided being repetitive, and it gave both groups a quiet moment before the finale.

Of course, at this point we begin to really see who Ashmore is. There have been hints along the way that he isn't quite the villain we thought at first. And here we see the true measure of who he is. Arrogant, yes. But not unkind. Just very, very reckless. Which leads us to the major twist in the story. Hopefully, if people have been reading carefully this shouldn't be a complete surprise, or at least it hopefully doesn't come out of left field. Hints were certainly dropped, and Wilhelmina's actions will actually make more sense in previous books. It's no fun to explain a book, so I won't. But if you look back at how easily Wilhelmina (seemed) to adjust to G&W's life, you might find that suspicious now. And Wilhelmina being upset when Helen returned wasn't jealousy, really. She really thought she'd escaped her fate and her mission, which she didn't really want to do any more... and Helen's return changed all that. I really liked Wilhelmina. My friend Laura, who was a beta reader for me, hated her. And I can see that. She's the sort of character in a book that you can come to hate. She starts off so awkward and she's not a good adventurer and she's getting in-between the main duo. But I hope that a lot of readers liked her and felt as betrayed by her actions as G&W did. That was hard to write, her ending. Which, to me, meant it was the right thing.

And I hope people didn't find it TOO cut and dried. Because, in the end, putting aside Wilhelmina's religious motivations, she might have a point. Should anyone wield as much power over events as Helen, Josiah and Ashmore now do? I think it's a valid question, and one I hope the reader thinks about.

I'm not going to say a great deal about the end, because I'd like for it to stand on it's own, for the most part. All in all, I'm really proud of these books. Even months later after the final book was published, I remain happy that they were (hopefully) fun adventure books that also explored some important (to me) themes, if more in the background. The final moments of the book, and the final choices that the characters make are really important to me, not just in the book but in real life as well. It's always so hard to know, when you're writing something, how others will perceive your work. That's why I like to read the reviews people write about them. There are times I'm a bit perplexed by what people have said, but it's always interesting. And I'm so happy that thousands of people have given the book a chance. I hope we can pick up some more, too.

One of the main themes of the book is the concept of time as a spiral. When the thought came to me (independent of the book) all those years ago, I really loved the idea. I doubt it's very scientific. But, the spiral is everywhere in our universe. And there was something so romantically appealing about even the end of everything not really being the end. I'd heard of the theory that the beginning and end of the universe might be the same moment. But a loop sounded so boring. But a spiral, where even time itself can evolve, where the sequence of our lives can grow, and possibly even get better... well, it appealed to me, anyway.

So, is this the end? Perhaps. Or maybe it's the beginning.

Patiently Waiting...

The topic of this blog is a blatant lie. I'm actually terribly impatient. I'll explain why in a bit.

First of all, let me say that today was an odd one for me. For the first Tuesday in over a month and a half, I had no new installment of Grace & Witherbloom coming out. I didn't need to check that the book had "live" on Amazon, or make sure all the graphics and web pages were updated and sent to the server to go live as soon as the book was officially available. I didn't need to make the entry on Goodreads for the book or post about it on the various forums I frequent.

No, I just got up, went to work and then came home. On one hand it was sort of a relief not to have to do all that extra bit of work. It wasn't much, but it was a time commitment. On the other hand, it was sort of sad. I liked putting out a new novella every week. Thankfully the last week I've had Mass Effect 3 to occupy my time. I thought it was as brilliant as the others. I'm even one of those rare folk who actually liked the ending.

But I digress. The reason I am getting impatient, I must confess, is that I REALLY want to know what people thought of the ending to the series of adventures for Grace & Witherbloom! Were readers surprised? Were they satisfied? Actually, Mass Effect 3 has got me thinking a lot about endings. If you haven't heard, there has been a huge amount of controversy raised about the ending of the game. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say a lot of passionate fans are very angry. Some of it I can understand, though I don't necessarily agree. Some of it seems a bit overblown. But whatever you think of the reaction, it really goes to show you how a bad ending to a story can really make or break a piece of literature, a movie or a vide game.

I hope my ending in The Forgotten Fair fairs (pun definitely intended) better than Mass Effect 3.

Important Notice: For Those Who Downloaded The Forgotten Fair March 20

Hi everyone - if you downloaded The Forgotten Fair on March 20, you have an old version of the book that still contains some silly errors. The corrected version of the book is up now. To get the corrected version, all you have to do is delete the old version from your device and then re-download from Amazon. You don't have to purchase the book again.

This is only going to affect five people at this point, but as those are the people who downloaded it right away, I wanted to make sure your reading experience isn't negatively impacted.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Finale...

It's coming. Just a couple more days. Right now I'm doing one last little read through. Just to fine tune here and there if needed, and hopefully catch any dumb mistakes that somehow slipped through the copy editing process. It's strange to think that in just a couple more days, all seven novellas will have been released. I have to say, I'm really pleased with how the final book, The Forgotten Fair, has turned out. It's always annoying when you read a story (or, in this case, a series of stories) and in the end it kind of peters out. But I think you'll be happy. I hope you'll be happy! But at this point all I can do is make it as exciting and interesting as I can and hope you'll agree.

It's interesting, because the end of the series was pretty firm in my mind by the time I'd finished The Girl Who Died Backwards. Not the exact details, but the general gist of it was definitely there. The reason I trailed off on the last "Origin" blog is that I do plan to pick the story up in further blogs that will go behind the scenes of each book. So I can elaborate there. But for now I'll just say that as much as the ending reflects my original plans, it's interesting to me to see all the depth and characters and details in their final form. There are characters here that I never planned when I started. People do things I didn't expect they'd do, especially as I was starting the first novella.

But perhaps the most surprising thing is how personal the book has become for me. My main goal in all of this was to write an exciting, fun and interesting series of novellas. But I enjoy entertainment that has some meat on its bones. And the thoughts that are constantly swirling through my head have certainly seeped into the book. And, in that way, it's become quite personal and meaningful to me. I don't know if it will be for you. It's sufficient for my purposes that you are entertained and satisfied by the ending.

Not long now. And remember...

Change Is A Matter of Time. :)