Mark smiled as well, and offered his hand to me. With a relieved grin, I took it and we walked briskly along the sidewalk, not knowing what we were about to face, but excited about the prospect that we were now free enough to experience it.
End
Alternate Part 3
Long-Winded Author’s Note
Welcome to my long-winded explanation of Inside!
This novel was such a labor of love and I put so much into it, I consider it to be one of my most developed stories. It is for that reason that I wanted to release some special things in honor of its 5th year.
To start at the beginning, I started this novel in June of 2012 quite unintentionally. I was living in Pau, France at the time and had every intention of working on The Faith while I was surrounded by the impressive cathedrals and castles that I do not see at home in the United States. However, one rainy Saturday, I was severely lacking inspiration and decided to watch some music videos. One particular music video was one that my friend had shown me before I left for France, and in the first fifteen seconds of the music video (it was a dance track), the singer tilted his head in a certain way that bombarded me with the entirety of this novel.
Yes, that was really all it took.
I immediately saw the dance scene between Lily and Dana in Archangel back in Part One. I wrote that scene that same day and that was when Inside got its hooks in me and would not let go. The Faith would not be written for several more years—Dana demanded too much attention.
I had had the idea for a story like Inside when I was a fourteen-year-old, but the story felt far too large for me to tackle at that age. However, Dana always lingered in the back of my mind and finally came to paper June 2012, which started an eighteen month journey to finish the first draft of Inside. While writing Inside, I was traveling through the south of France, back home to the U.S., and then across the Pacific Ocean to study and live in Hiroshima for a year. Nearly 80% of Inside was written while I was abroad. I think writing while abroad allowed me to distance myself a little from the politics of the U.S. while I was working on the first draft. I finished up the novel while completing my degree back in the U.S., and I remember it being a very trying time for me.
According to my friends and family, I became withdrawn and isolated myself from everyone. I began drinking quite heavily, was unable to sleep, and struggled to carry on normal conversations as I was too lost in the world of Inside in my head. All of this became more pronounced when I was in Part Three, and had to determine an ending for this book. I will explain later how I came to publish the first ending later, but, needless to say, the moment I finished the first draft, I felt as though I could finally breathe again.
This was a very demanding novel, and I put a lot more thought into it than most people realize.
When I was developing the story at first, there were two details I was sure to solidify before I even started Lily’s journey. One—Lily needed a name and a nickname that would sound extremely creepy if said in the right tone. I wanted the villain of this novel to have a nickname for Lily that would send shivers down reader’s spines, similarly to Anthony Hopkins saying “Hello, Clarice,” in his role as Hannibal Lecter. Thus, “Little Lily” was the nickname I came up with and, subsequently, that was how Lily was named. Two—Dana’s last name needed to be very carefully chosen. Yes, even Dana’s last name had an enormous amount of thought put into it. Since I already liked the name Dana for him, I felt that his last name needed to start with a “C” in order to allude to Washington D.C. and show that the corruption never left America in the world of Inside. Dana was meant to be the embodiment of corruption, so his name had to be indicative of the real-world corruption we see in our nation. I finally decided on Christenson because of the allusion to being of a Christian nation, as that is the largest religion in America, despite religion being banned in the world of Inside. Also, Dana’s name has another fun fact about it—the experiment #41141, which was Dana’s experiment number, spells DANA in the alphabet (4=D; 1=A; 14=N; 1=A).
When I started to solidify these details, I realized that this story was going to have several layers and would need a lot of careful consideration put into every detail. I began writing it like the well-known dystopian fictions on the market, with a seventeen-year-old girl in a dystopian society written to be marketed to a young adult audience. But, I wanted to create a more realistic portrayal of how a seventeen-year-old would fare against an entire corrupt government. I also wanted to create a realistic dystopian, building it off of the real world problems I heard about all the time. My philosophy when I was building America in Inside was to pick a hot-button topic, and then take it to the extreme in any way that would make sense for the “peace” established in Inside. That was not an easy task, as there were a lot of stances I had to take that were against my own personal beliefs. But I wanted to be very careful not to bring current political parties, scandals, or anything into the novel that would tie it to the reality Americans know today. I purposely never mentioned political parties or tried to make anything in the novel push any political agenda, as that was not the purpose of Inside.
However, making this as realistic as I wanted was difficult to do while gearing it to a younger audience. I struggled to write this for a long time, trying to tone down just how dark the story wanted to be. I decided that if I was going to do justice to the amount of work I was putting into crafting the overall message of the story and building this dystopian America, I needed to commit fully. In my first write of the original first twenty chapters, Dana was dialed back—a lot. He was not menacing as much as he was just crazy. He had a more schizophrenic nature where he would occasionally switch between Dana and the man he was before the Commission. He also did not have a lot of social insight into why he ran the Commission of the People the way he did. His reasoning was often just because he had the power to do it, and a “why not?” attitude. He was reined in so much because I was worried about my audience, and how much he would offend people. Like any author, I wanted the book to be well-received.
But there was no reining in Dana Christenson. I had a moment when writing a scene between him and Lily where I began to delete one of his lines because I thought it would be too controversial. And then I realized I was writing a story about a modern-day holocaust of minorities. I had to commit to it fully or it would come across as contrived, or offensive in a completely different way.
So I went back through the chapters and loosened my control over what Dana said. Soon, he was dominating the pages entirely.
Dana was clearly the villain of Inside, but I wanted to give the reader an understanding of how people could follow his orders, even if it was to hurt another person. I wanted Dana to be a horrifying figure for the reader as well, but I did not want him to be so clearly evil that the reader could not agree with him on certain points. With most villains who talk about how horrible humans are, a lot of people agree with that sentiment—just look at the world today. However, I wanted to take it a level deeper. I wanted him to bring up some social possibilities that would have people agreeing with him, but wondering why he was making sense and why agreeing with him felt wrong. This was one of the hardest things I had to do with him, simply because it was a very dark headspace for me to get into in order to make his logic come across correctly.
Yet another thing about Dana that was extremely important for me to convey was how powerful he truly was. The brainwashing, the command of the nation…everything that he had control over was meant to make him feel impossible to beat. I wanted the reader to feel like there was no way Lily would defeat him, but would want her to win against all odds. However, in keeping with the raw realism I wanted to maintain with the book, I knew she could not win against him. In both endings, she does not actually win. (There was a third ending that I will talk about shortly where she still doesn’t win even though Dana dies in that ending).
As I worked on the novel, I reached a very interesting problem with just how powerful Dana was�
��there was no way for Lily and Clark to gain any sort of ground on him. It was not plausible for them to even begin to plan an attack against him or the Commission because he had everything so well organized and had every intention of capturing Lily for the purposes of making her Dana 2.0. That was where the idea of the mysterious notes left for Clark and Lily came into play. In the very first write, those notes were left by Dana’s alternate side and he had written them in the moments where he wanted to be killed and for the Commission to be exposed. Once I scrapped the idea of Dana even having that side of himself (he’s supposed to be the very embodiment of corruption, after all), I started toying with the idea that Dana had left them to lead Lily into a trap right from the start.
But something about all that did not sit right with me. As I got further in, I realized that in order to show Lily’s true progression of character she needed to gain some ground on Dana and start a rebellion. However, she could not do that alone, and she could not do that with only Clark’s help.
Enter Mark.
Mark is my favorite character of Inside, even though he was one of the most difficult characters to write. He was always a part of the novel as a member of the Eight Group security of the Commission, but they were originally meant to be loyal to Dana. It was not until an interesting experience of mine on a bus ride in Japan that I realized how drastically I could change Mark’s character.
I was on a bus traveling to the train station in my city to head into Hiroshima for the day when some young Japanese men got on the bus and sat down near me and a few of my international friends. The boys started talking about the foreigners on the bus, including commenting on the female foreigner’s bodies. This happened a lot. Seeing that we were foreign, they believed we did not understand Japanese and we could not understand that they were talking about us.
I decided to reverse my own experiences and wrote Mark’s introduction scene with that in mind—that he understood everything that was being said about him. It became evident that everyone in the Commission would talk very loosely around Mark if they believed he did not understand, and that allowed him to know everything. I have to admit, it was very difficult for me to keep it a secret that he understood everything that was being said for such a long time, and since I already knew how badass Mark was, having Lily treat him as someone “cute” was surprisingly difficult. There were two moments in the book where the character of Mark slipped up in pretending he did not understand Lily—did you catch them?
Inside is obviously a book with a lot of layers to it, and one of those layers is the symbolic one. On the symbolic level of Inside, Dana symbolizes corruption. I intended for Lily to represent the American people before corruption, however that changed when Mark entered the picture. Lily ended up representing the nation of America without corruption—idealistic, hopeful, and wanting everyone to have a fair chance at the best life they could live. Mark came to represent the people—strong, powerful, but silenced by the corruption in power. He became the backbone of everything in the story, just as a nation’s people are its backbone. Without him, the story just could not move forward as needed.
With the major players in place, I set to work on the harrowing story that was unfolding in my mind.
I could go on and on about the levels of tiny detail in the story, such as Lily’s acts of rebellion all having references to the thirteen original American colonies, or how there are several references to my other novels, such as The Significant and the Dimension Guardian Series (as well as a few unpublished works), but I won’t go into that much detail. I will, however, explain how the ending came to being and why there is an alternate ending.
Once I was back in America and finishing up both my degree and this novel, I had been in a very dark place mentally with this novel. You think it was heavy to read? I was living in this word for eighteen months, and not just in the world of Inside, but I was traveling through Lily’s journey as it was unfolding, and it was exhausting. As I stated before, this book consumed me and I became withdrawn and borderline-alcoholic just to get through it. My mind was a constant dark spiral of thoughts as the story reached its fever pitch.
The turning point of Lily’s revolution happens when Dana releases Mykail’s brother to attack Central for counter propaganda to bring the American people back to his side. This was where the book began to feel hopeless and I thought that it would be better to have the rebellion go quiet and possibly flee the country before they were caught. In fact, that was the original plan for the book’s ending.
The problem I faced was Mark. It was difficult for me to think of him running away after everything he had already done for the rebellion. There were a lot of former Commission experiments that I could not see running away unless something very drastic happened close to home. That prompted me to write the death of a character that was the second-hardest to write in the novel—Josh.
Killing Josh was an extremely difficult decision for me for a lot of reasons. First, I really liked the character of Josh. He was a lighter character to write and it was nice to have a small ray of happiness among my dark, brooding characters. Second, it had to be an excruciating death to scare everyone to back off of the revolution. Doing that to such a light-hearted character was upsetting for me as the writer because I did not want him to suffer, but he had to for the sake of the story and to force the other characters to back off of the revolution. And third, I was terrified of how much it would destroy the character of Mark.
I know, I’m talking about these characters like they’re real people. Let’s take a short break for me to explain this jargon that writers have for their characters. Even earlier in this note, I talked about how Dana was demanding, and how I had to rein him in, as if I didn’t already control every action put on paper. But the truth is, while writers are in control of everything in the novel, we set a construct for a character and a world and to keep the story believable and maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief, we have to stay to those constructs. For example, if Lily were to go up to Mark before Josh’s death and say “I want to stop this revolution,” having Mark just say “Okay” would have felt cheap and unbelievable considering the rest of the novel. Therefore, these characters actually can’t move certain directions if we want things to be believable.
So, when I say that I was worried about how Josh’s death would destroy Mark, I meant I was worried about how deep I would have to write Mark’s mourning to show how close Josh was to him and how hurt he was over his death in order for the reader to feel it to be believable that he would want to give up on the revolution. However, as Mark is my favorite character in Inside, I was horrified at how badly I would have to hurt him.
This is where the endings diverge from one another. Let’s talk about this ending, the “Alternate” ending.
As I was writing the first draft of Inside, I felt that having the characters flee to Mexico never resolved anything. Mykail died a horrible death, leaving Lily and Mark both mourning horrible losses and it felt too depressing to make the “they escaped to Mexico,” feel like a reprieve to the pain. Also, I became nervous when talking to a few of my brainstorming friends when they said “does that mean Lily and Mark are going to get together?” In case anyone was interested about Mark’s sexual orientation, he is asexual—he has no sexual attraction to people. I was worried that people would expect Lily and Mark to become a couple since that is the general theme in dystopian novels, and I did not want to put Lily and Mark into a daring escape from the country alone and then disappoint readers when they did not become a couple in the end. That was my first concern.
My second, and larger, concern was that it felt like a crushing defeat. Yes, there is a horrific defeat in the original published ending, but this ending felt more hopeless to me because they did not even put up a fight. Lily ran away. Clean and simple. She and the others ran away and gave up fighting for those who had no justice in America. To me, it sent a message of “fight until you feel you can’t win” rather than “fight a
s long as you believe in what you’re fighting for.” Also, this ending sort of pushed Dana into the background and it felt cheap to do to my all-star villain who constantly demanded the spotlight.
Of course, no matter which ending you read, you’ll notice that Clark gets captured by Dana and made into a Machine of Neutralization (D.E.M.O.N.). Having Lily disappear to Mexico did not allow the readers a lot of insight into what was happening with the D.E.M.O.N. program. Hell, in the alternate ending, the reader doesn’t even learn that the Machine of Neutralization is eventually named the D.E.M.O.N., which would make a few of my following publications a little confusing and would cheat them out of some nice references in my other books. If you don’t know the reference for the D.E.M.O.N., it’s in the Dimension Guardian Series and gets a decent-sized explanation in book five. Because of these ties, Clark was never going to escape his fate of being in the D.E.M.O.N. program. Sorry, Clark…you really got screwed over in this universe…as do almost all of your descendants…
That brings us to the first published ending. It was not an easy decision for me to take that road, but I felt that I had to make the ending as realistic as possible for the type of villain I had built in Dana. That started with killing most of the characters in the infamous battle scene that leads to Lily’s capture. I wanted to show that Dana had the military power to take them out entirely. Without the element of surprise or the brains to outmatch the brawn of the military, there was no standing against Dana. The savagery of the soldiers was also supposed to show the savagery of soldiers when they have an enemy to dehumanize. So, yes, Part 3 took a very dark turn, but it was the most realistic and that was what Inside was all about—being too real.
When Part 3 began getting bad reviews, I was not at all surprised. I knew I was taking a chance. Lily’s transformation was very dark and upsetting, but it was carefully crafted, with Lily going through a more extreme version of the transformations she had already undergone earlier in the novel. Dana educating her on his true identity and how he changed from a revolutionary to the embodiment of corruption was meant to mirror what Lily would go through. As she feels physically powerless against him, the mental strain of being captured starts to break down her barriers until she hallucinates losing the people she loved who represented love (Tori), integrity (Griffin), hope (Josh), and finally identity (Mark). After that, her transformation into a creature of immediate gratification and pleasure shows what corruption leads to and how it takes root. That gives birth to Dana 2.0.
Inside Page 189