Midnight Wonders

X.X.1. End Notes

I don't know why I wrote this book. It's quite common to ask people why they write, and normally I would say that I write because it's fun. Which it is, usually. But writing this book was not fun. This is the worst experience I've ever had writing a book. I felt absolutely horrible writing almost the entire back half of it. I'm sure a large part of it was due to external stresses, but I was like crying in the middle of the night hammering out words lmao. I rarely cry now, but I used to be a big crybaby when I was younger, so maybe this is just another way it harks back to my childhood.

This book makes me a bit sad. I think I tried to portray some things using the veil of nostalgia to keep it happy, but it wears thin after a while. The detail that exemplifies this is Luc's waiting with the kids after school. When Catherine is the last one there it's a nice thing because she gets to spend time with Luc and she loves to talk so she isn't just sitting there in her own thoughts. I hated talking when I was a kid (and I still don't really like to talk), so when I was the last person at school fifteen minutes after the bell rang knowing my house was only five minutes away, I didn't really have a fun time.

But maybe you got picked up from school on time, and you didn't have to be called a different name because yours was too common, and you didn't stay in your house all summer. Maybe you couldn't look outside the window and see green hills rolling over the distance, and your streets didn't get coated by damp leaves in the autumn or white and yellow flowers in the spring. A lot of things are made up. A lot are not. Some things happened that coincided with the events of the book, like I actually got third-grade-age students, and it rained an unusually large amount in California this year.

I will be editing this, but I'll take my time with it. I usually take a long time to edit anyway, since I tend to do multiple rewrites on top of tweaking things. By a long time I mean at least a couple years. I think, too, it would be better for me to be a little older when I return to this. I think there's a message to this book that I find disingenuous because of who I am right now. What I mean is, who am I to write a book about a guy who learns not only to want things but actually go after the things he wants when I can hardly do that myself? I think I know what it's like to want things, but I can only run halfway before I give up and go back because it's, well, really hard. But, you know. I try.

Midnight Wonders may be a return to my childhood but it is also very much a change from my usual writing habits, and since I don't really have a main project right now I've been rereading a lot of my old work and feeling nostalgic for my cringe old works (I am very glad I spent my cringiest years off the internet) so I would like to write things for just myself right now.

Thank you for reading. This project means a lot to me (me about everything I've ever written). The only thing I can hope is that you found some joy or entertainment in reading it, but if I could hope for a little more I would hope that for someone this book means something too.

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Midnight Wonders has always been a deeply uncomfortable book. It was not meant to be. I feel as if I've said this a hundred times already, but it was supposed to be a "wholesome" book. As I was writing it, I kept trying to push it towards this wholesomeness and quite escapist optimism. However, the book itself demands suffering. It demands a confrontation with ugly things, and despite all this the ending manages to tie everything up into a neat little bow.

I think I have tried to defend myself by saying the book is unrealistic and a dream. Escapism. But how can it be? That defeats the whole purpose of the book.

Midnight Wonders is extremely ambiguous in its place. It lingers on the line between literary fiction and fantasy, and within the text it exists in a blur of time and space. There is no explicit grounding marker in the setting, it's just vaguely contemporary and in the western English-speaking world, and even the characters' ages and appearances are extremely vague. Part of this is due to my own lack of confidence to accurately portray specific times, places, cultures, peoples. Ambiguity allows for plausible deniability. However, by creating a "reality" detached from what reality actually is, a "reality" without the real issues people constantly have to navigate, the "reality" in Midnight Wonders becomes a utopia built of American fantasies.