the delicious wolves

Afterword

Thank you so much for reading 'the delicious wolves' (and yes, the lower case is on purpose). This story has a long, kind of weird history, so I thought I would share that with you today, plus what I plan to publish on Wattpad next!

The Beginning

The general idea of this story came to me eons ago (circa 2002). I won't lie, and some of you may have guessed, but originally I wanted to write a fanfiction about The Lord of the Rings. I began writing this lovely little story about Merry and Pippin and the difficulties of their relationship, and the more I wrote the farther away I got from the official timeline. When I read the timeline and saw how off it was, I decided that the story was hopeless. I also had no clue where to go from a certain point. So I put that story away, and went about my business.

A couple years later I explained the idea I had to my older sister, S----. We started going back and forth and thinking of an original plot. I started writing it while listening to my Hawksley Workman CD, "(last night we were) the delicious wolves", and it dawned on me that the songs seemed to follow my story pretty well. It also helped me finally find the ending to my story. So that's why all the chapter tittles are so strange, each chapter is a song off the album. Chapter one by the by, 'striptease', would be the fanfiction I wrote before that you will never read because well... it was just a means to an end (also, I'm not sure if I could ever find the file again).

At first I wasn't going to keep the album's name as the title for the story, but the more I looked at it the more I felt it was perfect. It feels rather sexual, if you ask me, and the 'last night we were' is kinda like saying 'once we were lovers'. So that's how I saw the title and like I said, I thought it was perfect (well, I did shorten it I guess). 

The First Draft

So after the initial fanfiction idea, I kept the pastoral setting. I knew they were all going to be war vets. I chose WWI over WWII because although the war took a huge personal toll on England, structurally it remained undamaged. I wanted their home to still be beautiful. Also, it was a time when the world was changing, lots of new technology and innovations, and people finally realising that homosexuality was not a disease (though obviously these were slow changes).

Sometimes I liked writing little Fred, the rest of the time not so much. Having had no experience with kids at the time I asked my mom - mother of six children - when kids start walking and talking. Her reply: "I dunno, look it up in a book." How can someone who's had six children not be an expert!? Ah well, I took a shot in the dark at how a two and half-year-old might act. I think he's kinda cute. I wanted the reason for Will and Pat breaking up to be irresistibly lovable. 

It was fairly difficult to write because at the beginning I wanted Will and Pat to be fighting and didn't want them to move fast, yet every time I put Will in a scene he seemed to want to jump Pat's bones. I can't say I blamed him, but it did get a little annoying after a while. Yes, I am speaking about characters as if they were real. In the scene in chapter four where Diamond tells them to go smoke their pipes, I can see her lighting one up after they leave to relieve the stress. Poor Diamond, I felt sorry for her, but I also didn't want her to feel like a victim. I tried to make her character strong and likeable, but in the end she is was still a barrier. I would have loved to write a story from Diamond's and Estella's POV. 

The entire time writing this I was plagued by the thought that I was basically just writing about someone who wants to have an affair with their old boyfriend. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but think about it: Married couple is very unhappy together, so one tracks down his old love - quite literally in this case - and then spends the next few months trying to convince them to have an affair with them.