Happily Ever After is a Fairy Tale

This week, a new serialized version of my first published novel, For Blood or Money, completed. You can check it out at http://nathaneverett.com/releases/fbom/

Written in 2006, For Blood or Money was first released as Security and Exchange in an anthology to raise money for building libraries in third world countries. We raised over $5,000 that year. The next year, the fledgling boutique publisher Long Tale Press released the book as For Blood or Money. It was my first commercial release and was well-received. I still have a couple of copies from its first printing. That was back before ‘on-demand’ publishing took hold. Good times.

The problem was my detective narrator died at the end of the story. Bummer. Readers wanted more of him. I resolved the problem five years later by writing a prequel, For Money or Mayhem. I raised some charitable funds with that book as well, selling a character in the book for $1,800 donated to Studio East Training for the Performing Arts (https://studio-east.org/). I like giving things away and when I don’t have money, I give away what I have: Words.

The problem was the detective’s girlfriend died at the end of the story. Poor Dag Hamar. Happily ever after seemed to be eluding him. Or at least eluding my readers.

Response to the end of For Blood or Money has been mixed. Here are a few samples taken from comments and email I’ve received this week.

“What an extraordinary story! Thanks.”
“Well, fuck!”
“Wow! Best ending--ever.”
“AAAhhhhhhh I do hate unhappy endings. Oh well a very good story just the same.”
“Magnificent story. The ending suits the tale.”
“Too bad you seem to prefer unhappy endings to your stories.”
“A great ending. More please.”
“The ending was very disappointing. I'm not just talking about the unhappy ending, but all the loose ends. 1) The unsolved code 2) No letter to Riley explaining his decision 3) Nothing for Billie 4) Maizie will eat his dead face when he's not alive to feed her. After the Gutenberg Rubric, this story was a major disappointment. But thanks for writing.”

Of course, I want to dwell on the last comment because it is instructive, listing the things the reader was disappointed in. It got me thinking about the nature of death and what it does to us. Well, it kills us, I guess. But I don’t know of anyone who was truly prepared to die. No one has all the loose ends of life tied up in a neat package with every string resolved. Every time I think about this, I think of all the things I need to get put in order in my life before I go traipsing around the world next fall.

Does someone have the password for my computer? Does anyone know who to contact? Will I disappear from my story sites and leave a hole that goes unfilled like an Indiana pothole? What happens to royalties and patronage? Heck! I should clean my refrigerator!

Dag’s life is not tidily wrapped up. It simply ends. It is no longer his concern. It leaves unanswered questions. It is left to those who survive to write the next chapter. One more comment I received:

“Any story that makes you pause and do some own self thinking about one's life choices is a good story. Your story is a great story! It made me just sit and think, as I'm dating a girl right now. Have I made my feelings toward her as known as I want them to be? So, I had a sit down and chat with her.”

What very few people know is I wrote a sequel to For Blood or Money in 2006 as well. Portions of it were written in parallel with the mystery and I considered at one time doing a flip-book where you read the story from one perspective from front to back and from another perspective from back to front.

I dug the manuscript for Municipal Blondes out of my files when I started serializing For Blood or Money and decided it was time for this book to see daylight. The story is narrated by Dag Hamar’s intrepid partner, Deb Riley. Riley was as important to For Blood or Money as Dag and he gradually turned more and more of the investigation over to her, ending by telling her there was a tattoo on a corpse that had the information needed to solve the code.

Municipal Blondes picks up the story in the hospital a few days before the end of For Blood or Money. It’s written in Riley’s voice and from her determination to finish Dag’s story. But it is no longer Dag’s story. It is Riley’s. And it has its own questions to be answered.

I’ve become almost obsessed over completing the rewrite of Municipal Blondes and it is coming along so well that I’ve decided to do a joint release of the mystery with Wild Woods on June 23. The contrast between the two books will be something to see!

Wild Woods is now in final proofreading and I expect the remaining readers to have their corrections to me by the first of April so I can start formatting the files for publication. Details on the double release will be available soon!

There. That’s as close to a happy ending as this blog post will ever have!