WWA Post Release Thoughts and the Future Of BOATK

You know what sucks?

Saying goodbye.

I can’t speak for other authors, but when you spend as much time with characters as I have with Bear, Otter, and the Kid (and Anna, and Creed, and Mrs. P), they almost take on a life of their own. The boys are a part of me, and I won’t ever be rid of them as long as I live, not even if I wanted to be. I’ve spent the better part of four years with them, in one version or another, and when I finished writing Who We Are, it was very difficult to believe that it was over. I wrote the last words, and while it was a time for celebration, I wanted frantically to continue the story and just write and write and write some more so I wouldn’t have to say good-bye to them. I love them for everything they are, warts and all. They’re not real, of course. But that in itself is a lie because they are real to me. In my head I know how they sound, how they walk, how they laugh, and how they cry. I know the clothes they wear, what their likes and dislikes are. What they fear. What they cherish.

Sometimes, I wonder if I know them better than anyone else.

I wanted to discuss a few things about the book, so obviously there will be spoilers. If you haven’t read Who We Are, its best you go there first before reading any further. For the rest of you, here’s a little taste of why certain things happened.

ABOUT THAT PROLOGUE…

Okay, here’s the deal. While I was initially writing Who We Are, Chapter One: Where Bear Goes To War was initially the prologue, an introduction back again to the boys. I was doing the first round edits for Elementally Evolved Book I: Burn and reading an m/m shifter book, when a realization hit me. One, it seems that a lot of m/m shifter books have collapsed in on themselves, becoming nothing more than the same story over and over and over again. Alpha Werewolf (or were-duck or were-penguin) is leader of his pack/almost leader of his pack/should be leading his pack and does not have a mate (and has never considered that his mate might just be a man! GASP! SHOCKING). Enter in said mate, most likely tinier in stature, but may also be… wait for it… A CHOSEN ONE!!!!!!! ZOMG!!!! Angst and strife ensue, but they always end up together. And then I realized that for all intents and purposes, I’d sort of done the same thing with Burn. Oh sure, there’s no shifters in the Elemental world, but essentially, it’s the same thing. It seemed I could escape certain clichés even though I tried, so I wanted to poke fun at myself and the shifter genre as a whole. Thus, the prologue to WWA was born. I tried to pile on every single cliché I could think of when writing it and had a blast doing so. This prologue was written back in September and was submitted with the finished manuscript to WWA.

However, certain… events… conspired earlier this year, as have already been discussed to death. I was asked repeatedly if the Kid would ever have any kind of response to these… events. Hence a certain snarky response about how shifter stories all seem the same and how people on the internet need to find things to do. That’s the only change I made to the prologue. Obviously, it was not born of any kind of malicious intent. Some people seem to find it funny, others seem to be pissed off that I wrote that specific line. Look: the whole prologue was me making fun of myself, and I really don’t have a mean bone in my body for it to be some kind of angry statement. I’ve learned it’s easier to laugh at something than to get angry. A little self-deprecation never hurt anyone. Lighten up!

THE MOST AWKWARD DINNER EVER...

The dinner scene. Most of the major players in the BOATK world together for the first time. Many of the responses I have received about WWA have mentioned this scene in one way or another. Before I began writing WWA, I made a conscious decision that I wanted the sequel to be funnier. I felt that certain parts of BOATK were dragged down by unnecessary melodrama and really, hadn’t Bear and the boys suffered enough? (And, already knowing how the last quarter of the book was going to go, I also wanted to lure the reader into a sort of false sense of safety as they read, only to get to the last section and have that ripped away. Yes, I am somewhat of a sadistic bastard.) For the dinner scene, I wanted the dialogue to snap, and be continuous, with multiple conversations running over each other, in a way that would initially be confusing, but would melt together into Creed’s revelation of his anger/weirdness at the end of BOATK. It was probably the most technically difficult scene that I had to write in WWA. It went through several revisions until I was satisfied. I think Bear’s drunken coming out stream of consciousness speech to Otter and Anna’s parents is probably my favorite part of the whole book. Bear is a light weight mess and I adore him. From the Kid inadvertently spilling that Anna and Creed are doing the baby-making floor tango, to Creed’s realization that he has to let Bear go (and that maybe, just maybe, he’s in good hands regardless), I wanted to show that families can be just big, drunken clusterfucks. I hope you got that from it too.

A QUESTION I’VE RECEIVED QUITE A BIT…

Is Bear gay? Straight? Bisexual? Gay for Otter? Gay for Otter’s penis? To answer this question, I’ll refer you to one of the last lines in Bear’s narrative, where I think I quietly put that question to rest: “I’m a gay bug zapper, remember?” It can be read two different ways.

WOOKIEE CRY FACE...

People who follow my posts know that I alluded to a scene in WWA where even I couldn’t keep from breaking down. Did you figure it out? No, it wasn’t when the Kid and Bear were lying in the bed after Otter and Bear returned from the gay bar (though, I will admit, the line the Kid says to the effect that without Bear, he’d lie down and die got me a bit choked up.) No it wasn’t when Otter came home to find Bear in the bathtub. It wasn’t Bear at the beach in his Tux waiting for Otter to show, knowing he wouldn’t and the reason why. It wasn’t the poem that followed (Bear! Bear! Bear!), or the rings, or the hospital, or Julie Mckenna returning. It wasn’t even Otter waking up.

It was the transition, you see, between Otter waking up and Mrs. Paquinn passing away.

Holy fuck me sideways was I a mess writing that.

I knew the whole last quarter of the book was going to happen before I started writing the book itself. I needed Bear to get knocked on his ass so he could finally open his eyes to see just how strong he really is. And I knew the only way he could see that is if everything happened at once. Otter. Mrs. Paquinn. Anna and Creed’s pregnancy. Julie returning with the truth of it all. I needed him to be the strong one, but of course, being Bear, it would be somewhat misguided (it is Bear, after all).

But what I did not expect was how much it would hurt getting to Mrs. P.

It’s a relatively short scene, her passing. Bear and the Kid in her room by themselves, knowing how their future is now awake in another room, watching part of their past slip away in front of them. It’s relatively short because I could not write more about it. I’ll admit to having a Wookiee cry face while I wrote that scene, and when Bear said, “Go on, old girl”? Gaaaaaaaaaaaah. I took a break for a few days after that to make sure it’s what was right for the story, that it was right for the characters.

And I found that it was.

I needed Bear to find his strength. And he did.

And I needed the Kid to hold his head tall, because well... I'm not done with him just yet.

ABOUT THAT EPILOGUE…

So. The Kid is in love with Dominic. And Dominic is…what? Gay? Bi? Straight? He told Bear he was fucking hot in the car. At the end, he’s dating some big-boobed woman named Stacey. And a separation is looming between Tyson and Dom, the Kid graduating early and going to school across the country, Dominic staying in Seafare where he's a cop.

Out of everything I’ve received as a response to WWA, the majority of it surrounds the epilogue and basically boils down to this: “TJ, you aren’t going to leave them like this, right? There’s going to be another book, right? RIGHT?!?!?!?!?!”

Come on, folks. What kind of an asshole do you take me for? If I didn’t feel that I could continue the story, I would not have left the epilogue as it was. That’d be a big ol’ downer, wouldn’t you say? So, while it may not be today, or tomorrow, or even in the next couple of months, you should know by now as well as I do that the Kid will start chattering in my ear again one day and I’ll feel the need to open up a new word doc and start a new story about Ty and Dom (and, just between you and me, I already have some of the story worked out in my head, and already know the first line and what the first chapter (prologue??) is going to look like). So yes, definitively yes, saying right here and now: BOATK3 will happen.

So that’s it. For now. I have to say goodbye and let them go, at least for a little while. The boys will go do their thing and I will go do mine. We’ll meet up again, down the road. And who knows what will happen then?

But… but… if I close my eyes, there are times that I think I can hear the ocean, that I can smell the salt in the air. There are times I’m on a little section of beach that no one really seems to know about. One eye is trained to the sky, to watch out for a certain seagull. In the distance, I can see three guys. One of them is big. One is just a little guy. The last is somewhere in between.

They all raise their hands and wave and it’s like they’ve been waiting for me.

I wave back.

And my God does it feel like coming home.