Second of all, I did not have more time. Back when I was writing full time, I wrote two or three novels a year. One I’d always write in the summer when I was off school. And the other one or two would generally take months and months, because I could only write about 2,000 words a day. Also, I took lots of long, long breaks when I was too stressed out with work stuff. During those periods of time, I didn’t write at all. Writing full time meant that I was always working on a novel. And writing Elegy Flynn meant taking a break from my novel, which really was screwing with my publishing schedule.
So, I just stopped writing them. I promised myself that if they ever started to get popular, I’d pick the stories back up. It’s been over a year. They have never gotten popular. I’m putting the nail in the Elegy Flynn coffin.
But I did want to take some time to try to tie up any loose ends that I left in the Elegy Flynn universe, so I’m writing this afterword.
One thing you have to understand is that there was no end game with these stories. I never intended to tell one big long story with them. I intended them to be serial in nature, with each episode pretty much tying itself up. And even though I had some longer-running threads through the stories, I didn’t have a real big plan for those either. If Elegy Flynn had been rabidly popular, I might have kept writing stories for several years, but it would have basically been the same thing over and over again. Elegy and Cathy would have been stuck in the bar. They would have picked up volurs. They would have fixed paradoxes. I never intended that to ever stop.
In regards to some of the threads, however.
Brody: “This Is What I Did”
So, there was going to be a story in which there were consequences for Brody’s killing Meurtia. He was going to be captured by Fate Central, and Elegy and Cathy were going to rescue him. This would have been the “season finale” for 2012. Elegy and Cathy would have rounded up a bunch of the volurs and convinced them all to testify that Meurtia had gone crazy and that they were all frightened of her (possibly by bribing them with free drinks.) Then they would have to sneak in to Fate Central to tell Brody that he was going to plead self-defense. He would have gotten off, and all would have been right with the world. And then maybe he and Cathy would have had sex in the bar, Elegy be damned.
Fuller: Time-Traveling Serial Killer
I didn’t have specific plans for Fuller stories, but I wanted him to be a bad guy who routinely showed up every season or so, kind of like Murdock in MacGyver. I figure at one point, they’d have had to team up with him for some reason or other, because teaming up with the bad guy is always fun.
Harmony: The Only Fate More Rebellious than Elegy
Elegy’s friend Harmony would have reappeared at some point, probably having caused lots of trouble and wanting Elegy to hide her. Then Elegy and the gang would have gotten entangled in her problems and had to help her fix them without Fate Central finding out.
Elegy and Reese: Doomed Love
Though I was never going to let these two be really together-together, I did intend the Woodstock thing to be a way for them to see each other and have a semblance of a relationship. I even thought that in the future, Fate Central might end up letting them work together more often, so Reese would have eventually been one of the regular volurs. Once Elegy was seeing Reese more often, she would have stopped randomly hooking up with the volurs.
Love Lives of the Time-Challenged
Though I would have given Cathy and Brody a good bit of time to have a relationship, it would have been fun to change things up over time and really get sort of soapy with the whole thing. If this had gone on for years, everyone would end up sleeping with everyone else at some point.
In the end, the Elegy Flynn stories are testament to my warped sense of humor, I think. Each episode has a lot of funny in-jokes and allusions. And then each episode ends on a downer note in which the characters always have to accept that they can’t change fate. For some reason, I think this is hilarious. I guess it’s the truth of life, right? You’re always fighting, always trying to change things, make things better, work harder, get more stuff, fix the world, save people, save things. And this is true no matter what happens. Because if you fix one thing, you just start trying to fix something else. So I guess it’s wry comment on the Sisyphean nature of humanity. Which I think is funny.
Because you have to laugh at it. There’s nothing else you can do.
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Adventures of Elegy Flynn Page 17