Epilogue

Author's Note

If you've made it this far, you've reached the end of Epilogue. Thank you for sticking with me all this way. I've got a few thoughts left that I want to share. So here goes.

How did it all start?

So I was studying publishing at school. We had a guest speaker from Wattpad come and tell us about the site. I thought the concept was interesting and I went to check it out. I immediately joined one of the bookclubs. We had to start writing new stories specifically for the club. So I sat down and wrote the first thing that came to mind, which turned out to be a sort of inner monologue about the world ending in a very unexciting sort of way. And that wound up being the first chapter. I sort of just went wild from there. I was really into The Walking Dead graphic novels at the time, and I think I wanted to write something with a similar plot structure—something that didn't have a defined direction but rather started at the end and just followed the characters indefinitely from that point on. That's also why it's called Epilogue.

How did I come up with the names for my characters?

Em, Comma, and Apostrophe are all named after punctuation marks (duh). I'm a bit of a grammar freak. The em-dash is my favourite punctuation mark, by the way—can you tell? Miu-sama is named after a friend of mine from Wattpad. Martha is a character I stole from a book I wrote a few years back that I never wound up doing anything with. All of the other names were plucked out of thin air.

What do glowdarks actually look like?

I don't know, and I hope I never find out. Seriously though, the whole point was for them to be something inconceivable, something that can only be described in paradoxes. But essentially they're just glowing shadows.

What do the numbers in the chapters represent?

Story arc and chapter number within that story arc. Don't ask me why I started with 0 instead of 1. But yeah, basically I was inspired by manga/anime to write a story with several self-contained story arcs that also fed into a larger plot. And I wasn't very creative with the chapter names.

What did I hope to accomplish with Epilogue?

I wanted the freedom to experiment. There are a lot of restrictions when it comes to writing novels. Well, at least if you hope to publish them there are. Posting a story on Wattpad meant knowing I was never going to attempt to publish it traditionally. It gave me the freedom to break all the rules. And posting chapter by chapter, week by week meant I could develop a large cast of characters over a long period of time, continuing the story however long I wanted to.

Epilogue isn't only the longest thing I've ever written, it's also the most experimental. I was able to do things like completely shift the genre between chapters. Sometimes it's fantasy. Sometimes it's horror. Sometimes it's science fiction. I was able to throw a chapter in the middle of the story where the characters were suddenly in a completely different setting with completely different personalities and relationships (side note: the whole pseudo-Olivia storyline is still my favourite in the entire series).

I was also able to try out new things. This was the first time I wrote a multiple first person POV story. It's also the first time I wrote female POV characters. I may not have done any of these things particularly well, but Epilogue encouraged me to broaden my horizons as a writer.

Why did I decide to end Epilogue?

When I started writing Epilogue, I intended it to be a weekly series that I would update indefinitely. My life wasn't as busy back then. Nowadays, I've got several things keeping me busy, like freelance editing, publishing classes, writing groups, blogging, and novels that I hope to publish. Last year, I was writing another novel at the same time as Epilogue, and the stress of having to crank out two chapters a week (one for each story) was overwhelming. I realized that this wasn't something I could carry on indefinitely, and so I decided to start working towards an ending. I also have a lot of other projects that I'm going to need to dedicate time to. Maybe you'll get to see some of them.