kisses are a better fate than wisdom
It’s a month until the release of Wisdom. I’ve been working on it, getting it ready for the big day, and I thought I would give you a little insight into what’s going on.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like “happily ever after.” It’s not that I don’t like happy endings. I do. Everything should have a happy ending. But I don’t like these blanket ones. (Side note: Just because I like happy ending doesn’t mean I wrote one – but I might have.)
Take the end of Cinderella. She gets married after meeting the guy once, and even though he’s supposedly so infatuated with her, he can’t even remember what she looks like well enough to find her without relying on a shoe size? They have a shotgun wedding, ride off in the carriage, the music soars, Disney says “Happily Ever After,” but I’m sitting there going, “And then what?”
How did the marriage work? Did they have anything in common? What kind of things do they do? Does Cinderella make a good queen? What does she do with her family? Did she take the mice with her when she moved out?
At some point, a story has to end, yes. But I don’t want it to end with a “everything will be great every day on now that they have this one thing.” I want a glimpse of what happily ever after will look like. Or maybe it’s not a happily ever after even.
Maybe the Prince beats Cinderella. Who knows? We know literally nothing about him, except he is unable to recognize faces. Maybe he’s autistic. I think I heard once they have a problem with facial recognition. And they can still have a happy life if he’s autistic, but it’s a different one than the one Disney always painted. A more interesting one, too.
So, anyway, I wrote the first three books in the My Blood Approves, and I left a few questions open. There’s some stuff I knew I wanted to answer in Wisdom.
But I got thinking about it – happily ever after is a really long time when you live forever. What would that even mean for vampires?
What would you really do with forever? I might go insane if I had forever and ever and ever stretched out before me.
All the titles of the books are taken from the e e cummings poem “Since Feeling Is First,” but Wisdom is an especially apt title. Alice has made a lot of choices in the books, some good, some bad. But it’s time for her to reap what she’s sown, to grow up and understand who she is and what she has yet to become.
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If you want to know what happened after “Happily ever after” with Cinderella, you’d best get thee a copy of Sondheim’s “Into The Woods,” the original Tony-winning cast featuring Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien, and Joanna Gleason.
It’s a great mash-up of all the well-known fairy tales like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella just to name a few. It retells the stories we know as an interconnected web in Act I, then shows us what happens after all the traditional “Happily ever after” moments in Act II.
It’s hilarious, smart, heartbreaking, and has some brilliant performances. If you haven’t seen it, get the DVD or watch it streaming on Netflix. Your jaw will drop! It’s that good. IMHO
Thanks for a very entertaining post! You and Eric crack me up!
That’s my two pence…
Arial 😉
“Maybe the Prince beats Cinderella. Who knows?” Lol
I cannot wait to read Wisdom, I usually don’t like the happily ever afters but I’m not going to lie..I want to see Alice and Jack together in the end xD
Sorry. That was supposed to say “is the best example because she has a squel.” Lol. Talk about editing!
I don’t think Cinderella is the best example best she has a sequel. Lol.
Also, I don’t think that there’s really the “best time” for any novel to be edited. For me, once I’ve written the novel that’s the time I need to edit once I have “fresh eyes” because then you’ll spot all your grammar mistakes, missing words, OOC moments, etc.
Good luck!
That is the best ending ever. That’s it. I’m scrapping the whole idea I had where Alice does this one and then Jack does this other, and Peter does something too… but never mind that ending!
The Zompire-Shark is the BEST!!!
You know what tho? The Zompire-Shark might fit better in my Cannibal Unicorn graphic novel. Maybe I should save it for that. Maybe…
Based on the books up to now, I have a feeling something is going to happen with a shark. So, I think a fun ending would be if Alice turned into a zombie vampire shark (or as I like to call it, zompire-shark.) You might find yourself asking, how could a vampire turn into a zompire-shark? I know I find myself asking this daily, but I’ve come up with an answer.
Alice is swimming in the night ocean, and a shark (preferably one that has a personal disdain for vampires, sort of like the vampire in Jaws: The Revenge, except this one must be even more intelligent if he can sense vampires.) bites her head off. It’d be like a Highlander death, and we all know that a vampire with now head isn’t very good at sucking blood.
Anyway, her body floats up to the top of the ocean, gets struck by lightning from some magical vampire wizard, and brings her back to life….but, what the magical vampire wizard didn’t expect, was that the lightning would also strike the super-intelligent vampire-seeking shark. With the dual crossover from the lightning strike, the shark and Alice’s bodies merge together, and Alice is left with a shark head, and a personal mission to kill other vampires (which would be pretty easy with her new shark-like motor skills, and a mouth full of giant teeth.)
There’s your happy ending! Feel free to take liberties with it.