Epilogue
Here we are again, dear reader. If you’re reading these words, you have my heartfelt thanks. To continue the tradition I started with Wasted Life, I’ll tell you a bit about how this story came to be.
By the time I finished Wasted Life, I knew I wanted to spend more time with Law and Walt. I didn’t know what the next mystery would be. I brainstormed a lot. I’ve developed a habit of keeping notes in my phone. Whenever I had a few minutes of quiet, I would wrack my brain to try to figure out what the next story would be. The plot did NOT come easily.
The problem of plot has been my problem since I started writing. I always figure out the characters first, then try to put them into a plot. Too often they just stand around and blink at me because I cannot figure out the event which will set them in motion.
My initial idea was to bring Bea back. I started to write a story where Bea lived in the apartment next to Law and Walt over Walt’s Special and she had her own accounting firm. The mystery was one of embezzlement and murder as uncovered by Bea for one of her clients. I wrote several chapters and ran straight into a writer’s block.
I discarded that idea and started writing another. My second plot was one where David disappeared from his farm and family. He drove into town one day and never went back. His son, Larry, found a letter David had written to Law and followed it to Philadelphia. Larry and Law worked together to locate David who was eventually found living in a rented room in the old Cassatt mansion. For those of you who don’t remember, the Cassatt mansion was the house which Madam Mitchell purchased to establish the Kingdom of Keystone.
I couldn’t get anywhere with the story. There didn’t seem to be any conflict. Out of frustration, I reached out to a reader for help. I don’t remember whom I contacted. It may have been Jeremy, who helped me before, or it might have been Bill. To both of you, I apologize for not remembering.
Whoever it was said the very thing that I feared. They said there wasn’t enough jeopardy. Walt and Law were living a fine life over their successful restaurant and no matter what Law discovered about David, it would make no difference to them in the long run.
I tried to save the story by adding all manner of contrived tension, but it was no good. The story just grew to be a muddled mess. At the suggestion of my story consultant, I swapped the roles of David and Larry. Larry was now the one in trouble and David was the worried father who had to beg his old friend and benefactor for help.
The story started to work. I wrote and wrote and for a time, things went well. When the work is working, the words flow from my mind to my fingers to the page almost without conscious thought. They simply appear like they were already written on the page in invisible ink and all I have to do is uncover them. That’s how the story went in the beginning.
Somewhere around the time when Law and David went to the races, everything fell apart. The way I’d envisioned the climax of the tale proved to be dull and uninspired. The whole of the plot seemed painfully obvious. I kept looking back at the twists and turns of Wasted Life. When I compared it to the linear plot of the story I was working on, I loved the former and HATED the latter.
I beat my head against the story until working on it started to feel like doing my AP English homework (a class I hated in my senior year of high school). I was tempted to scrap the whole thing and start a completely new project. In desperation I sent the tale to Bill.
I met Bill when I was publishing the chapters of one of the Crown Vic series stories on GayDemon. I sent multiple chapters in at the same time and a pair of them were released out of order. Immediately after that happened, I was struck down with a bad bout of diverticulitis and did not post for a month. Bill emailed me to find out what happened. In his email, he spun a tale where he tried to guess why I hadn’t posted.
His guess was that I flew into a rage at Bjorn, the GayDemon webmaster, over my chapters being posted out of order. This writer’s rage over having my work cruelly mixed up drove me to say things which I could not take back and which resulted in my banishment from the GayDemon domain.
None of that actually happened. I was merely miserable and sick and did not have the capacity to edit and publish my work. For the record, Bjorn has always been the most welcoming webmaster there is. While the assumption Bill made about why my story stopped so abruptly was incorrect, I enjoyed the creativity behind it. I asked Bill and his creativity for help.
Bill warned me that he may be slow to respond. He cautioned me not to count on him if I felt any urgency for an answer. I replied that I was hopelessly blocked and that any answer in any amount of time was better than what I had, which was nothing.
To my surprise and gratification, Bill responded after just a few days. His idea was beautiful in its simplicity AND tantalizing in its misdirection. Bill was the one who suggested that the brutally mutilated corpse was not who everyone thought it was. Prior to Bill’s intervention, the dead man was Ted, and the story was without luster. After Bill’s wisdom, Ted came back to life and the corpse became an incidental character.
Not only was Ted resurrected by Bill’s idea, but so was the story. Finally, I was excited again. Finally, the work started to work again. I will admit that ‘The Sin of the Fathers’ did not come as easily as some of the other tales which I have published here. Its birth required a more difficult labor, but the finished product was well worth it.
So, THANK YOU BILL! For those of you who liked the story and enjoyed the plot twist, PLEASE drop a comment below. Bill has done what most people who are uncomfortable with praise do. He has deprecated the value of his contribution to the story. Please tell him he’s wrong to do so.
As for the story, I reverted to type with this one. What I mean is that I wrote Wasted Life to fit into a mold. That mold was one of a traditional murder mystery as written by the greats in the golden age of mysteries, the 1930s to the 1950s. Law was a hard-boiled detective working on an impossible mystery while aspects of his life disintegrated around him. I kept the story short, a little less than 80K words, the prose brutal, and the action sharp.
When I wrote The Sin of the Fathers, I couldn’t fit that story into the old mold. Law was no longer the archetypical detective. Nine years of living as Walt’s partner had softened his speech and muted the violence of his nature. He was still the same man. He was still capable of seizing someone by their lapels and manhandling them, but he didn’t lean into it like he used to.
The main difference between Sins and Wasted was Law’s attitude. In Wasted Life, he was miserable, barely clinging to his life and livelihood like moss on a weatherbeaten rock. In The Sin of the Fathers, he was mostly content. Maybe he didn’t love his job, but he loved his husband and was content with his life. His livelihood was as easy as descending a flight of stairs and donning a hair net and apron.
Because of Law’s contentment, he was able to talk more. He was also able to be a better person. His tongue wasn’t as sharp and brutal as it had been in Wasted Life. There was more understanding in his heart. He was better able to provide advice, comfort, and to engage with his fellow man.
The changes in Law allowed me to let the story breathe. As a result, Sin is twice as long as Wasted. I think that’s OK. I don’t think the story lags anywhere, but you can tell me that better than I can see it for myself. If I had it to do over again, I might leave Charlie out of the story. I think his inclusion was an overreach. I’m not going to edit him out. I merely make the observation for the purpose of discussion.
*Shrug*
I suspect that’s enough story analysis. Now, it’s on to the appreciation.
To Bill, THANK YOU! To the rest of you, to all the readers out there who don’t comment, thank you for being here. To those of you who do comment, to Jim and Lee and Geoff and David and Dano and Kiss and Wimby, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!! I LOVE FEEDBACK!
Praise is nice, but an honest assessment of the story is even more gratifying and way more useful. None of you can know how frequently one of your comments points out a weakness in a future chapter. I have done so many frantic rewrites in response to a well-written comment than I will ever admit.
My father taught me to do everything with care and professionalism. I have tried to apply those principles to my writing. I want to get better and better and I want my stories to get better and better. You who comment expose my blind spots and help me to improve. I appreciate you all.
In another epilogue to another story, I said that if I had no one to sing to, I would sing to an empty room, but that it’s so much nicer to have an audience. I admit that was a lie. Without an audience, I would likely stand mute. You make the work matter.
THANK YOU!!
Yours very sincerely,
Sam
PS: There will be one more Law Edwards mystery. If any of you would be willing to be a story consultant, to bounce ideas around and maybe read a draft or two, let me know via email
