Afterword

Author's Note:

This afterword was written back in late December of 2012, and has not been changed. When I announced the project for NaNoWriMo in 2013, I mentioned that I had written an afterword for Death Like Wine, but had never posted it. A couple people expressed interest in reading it, so here you are.

The statistics mentioned below are all old. You can find new ones in the introduction for the 2013 NaNoWriMo effort, Ex Profundis. The request for feedback is old too-- I had the great pleasure of being in a writing group in the Spring that dissected the majority of Death Like Wine. If you have feedback, I would love to hear it, but it is no longer a pressing concern.

Hello again, dear readers,

It's been a while. I haven't looked at Death Like Wine since the very early morning of December 1^st, and I've only looked at the site a couple times since then. But I figured it was high time to give you the promised afterword-- if anyone is still reading, that is.

First, let me give you some statistics.

At the current count, the blog has over 2,350 page views. And no, this doesn't count your author maniacally refreshing the page. It's not unique visitors either. But people who were not me went to the site over two thousand three hundred and fifty times.

At the end of November, the blog was the number two result on google for the phrase “Death Like Wine.” We're number five now.

Throughout November, the vast majority of page views came from the United States. Italy was well represented too, Germany much less, and then, astonishingly, also China, Australia, Colombia, the United Kingdom, and Sweden with a single view each. I have no idea what that's about.

Open Office lists the final word count as 5,3392, well over the 50,000 mark required to win NaNoWriMo. There are 127 pages, single spaced. This isn’t counting the author’s notes for each chapter, or all my planning notes and graphs—literal, Computer-Science-y graphs.

All in all, by the numbers, I think it was a pretty successful month of writing.

But was it successful from a standpoint of, ah, art? That's point number two: the content. There is a lot to talk about, so I'm sorry if this is somewhat fragmented, but hopefully it will shed a bit of light on the novel.

Although I'm getting ahead of myself-- let's talk for a bit about why I'm writing this afterword.

In part, I'm writing it because, well, to be quite, quite honest, I'm in need of some feedback. I've gotten surprisingly little. I'm in need of feedback from myself, and this is the start of a long re-writing process that will end sometime in the spring, and end with 5 free published copies of Death Like Wine courtesy of some NaNoWriMo partners. But I'm also in need of feedback from you— what you liked, what you didn't like, what interested you, what was cold turkey, etc. I know you're out there, with interesting thoughts— my mother alone can't generate 2,300 page views. So hopefully, by writing and posting this afterword, it can jump-start my self-editorial process, and jump-start yours as well.

In all seriousness, though, I would love to hear anything any of you thought about the work as a whole. Comment on this, e-mail me, facebook me, pull me aside the next time you see me, anything. I'd love to hear critiques.

Ok, I'm done with the begging. Onto the actual self review of content. Now, this won't be anything detailed— no chapter-by-chapter critiques. This is more a sweeping meditation on the point of the novel, and whether I think I achieved it or not.

Let's start with the title, then. Death Like Wine. Why did I pick that?

The answer is that I needed a name for the blog, and for my entry on the NaNoWriMo website from Day 0. At this point, I had a good idea of four of my characters and the idea of the Brews. I also knew my main theme: why people live, and more properly, how.

Death like Wine is actually a quote from Chesterton: “he must desire life like water, and drink death like wine.” I won't unpack the quote, since it would spoil parts of the Ball and the Cross, but there is the idea of not seeking something too desperately. Even though the character desires life, he cannot limit his experiences to just that. He must experience some of death too.

What do I mean by that? Well, it's something that I think our culture struggles with, and something my character would struggle with. People get extremely focused on the idea of doing something memorable and entertaining, and the trap is that people might do these things solely for those reasons, and not for the intrinsic joy those actions may bring. Let me give you a concrete example: I was hiking around some frozen rivers with my family, and my mother and I were both taking pictures. My siblings would have fun with their crazy antics, and then they would scurry over to see the pictures we had taken. I got very disturbed with the whole process when I realize that we were looking at the pictures more than we were actually having fun— and the fun was transforming into something that would only be worthy of a picture.

We see this all the time. Someone makes an awesome pose-- facebook profile pic! But then people start making awesome poses simply to get facebook profile pics, instead of the other way around. Now, there's nothing wrong with this on the surface, but there's a sad trend of doing things less because of the joy, and more because of the joy of remembering it. I know I'm explaining this poorly, so let me try this: when we are doing things, we need to do them because they're good, not because we can say that they're good later. The obvious proof of this is whether we would still do these things if there were no outsiders watching: would we pray as piously by ourselves? Would we still creep close to the mountain edge if there were no cameras?

Tied up in all of that, I think, was the fear that we can lose the joy of an activity by pursuing the joy too fiercely. So that worked with the title, if we keep the larger Chesterton quote in mind.

But I also had the ideas of the Brews in mind: the Brews are a kind of death, for a lot of reasons that Miranda and Alexandria talk about in Chapter 17. And they're literally like wine, insomuch as they're liquid, and are consumed for similar reasons at similar times. And there's a nice ambiguity about both as well: some characters can handle the Brews just fine. Some characters cannot. Some friends I know can handle alcohol just fine. Some cannot.

With all of that in mind, I picked the title as best I could, and proceeded not to worry about it. If I had to do it all again, I would have picked a lunar title, since the moon ended up being a much more important symbol than I ever suspected. But we'll get to the moon in a bit.

The title was set from the beginning, as were four of the characters: Alexandria, Alexander, Calvin (in my notes, he was called Caliban), and Miranda. When I started planning, I had a list of 7 or so questions that each of my characters had to “answer”, and I had mapped out all the 1 on 1 interactions: their areas of conflict, their areas of overlap, etc. After a week of doing this, I added on the character of Adrian, who completed the five well. Theresa's growth as a character was a happy accident: she wasn't supposed to have a life beyond Chapter 3, but I'm glad she did.

In the end, I'm happiest about the interaction between Calvin and Alexandria. There wasn't too much romance, and their relationship helped me explore one of the big themes of the book: the human as an actor (I'll talk about that later, too). My biggest regret in this relationship was that Calvin doesn't really have an ending: he turns the lighthouse back on, which is incredibly important, but that's about it for his character. I didn't have time to get back to him in the story, and I'm not quite sure where he would end up— but I think it's fine that there are loose ends in a work like this.

The interaction I'm the least happy about is Theresa and Adrian. About a week into November, I planned out the entirety of the rest of the story. In it, Adrian was slowly going to seduce Theresa into relying on the Brews, in a more direct way to what he was doing with Adrian, and eventually, she was going to kill herself. Alexander, of course, was going to have the same problem, but find a correct way out of his problems, and the book would end happily. Originally, the whole group of six were going to go into the mountains: Alexander and Miranda would act about the same, but Alexandria and Adrian would discover the Lighthouse, while Theresa would beg Calvin for help (which, being hyper-rational and bad with people, he wouldn't get at all), and Alexandria would start to figure out that all is not well with Adrian.

But there simply wasn't time in November. I cut Theresa and Adrian from the trip, tied together all their conflicts that I had carefully set up earlier, and hastily ended their relationship. And besides, three suicides at the end of the book is too much.

Alexander and Miranda went about as well as I could expect, except I always worry that Alexander's pathos isn't really clear. I'll leave that to you, dear reader, since I'm too close to the story to really tell whether it worked.

The central question of the story is why we read books, watch films, or do anything at all. Why do we live the way we do?

 Do we do things merely for their emotional value? A movie like Citizen Kane or A Man for All Seasons might not hit someone in the feels in the same way that, say, Titanic would, but I think most people would agree that the former two are better movies. This is one of the huge problems that I have with things like the Twilight series, or Eragon, or any of that other sub-standard sci-fi/fantasy stuff out there: whatever you want to say about their quality, the simple fact is that people like them, and are getting emotional goodies out of those things. Does there need to be anything more?

Philosophical readers might notice here an old problem in utilitarianism. You can establish that pleasure is the be-all, end-all of human existence— but what kind of pleasure is important? Can we really compare the pleasure of eating a steak to playing a great board game to having sex? Are some pleasures higher than others? You certainly feel more when watching a sob-fest like Titanic, those kind of movies are designed to hit every single heart string in your body, but should mere quantity be the standard?

Anyway, I conceived the idea of a drink that was called ‘Utility.’ I thought of putting this joke in the book, but decided against it. Essentially, the drink was pure pleasure— you could get whatever feels you wanted whenever you wanted them. What would society look like if such a thing existed?

In the end, I decided to nerf it down a ton. A friend of mine pointed out that society would probably completely collapse—and I don’t disagree with her. So I added the drop, made the emotions less specific (and therefore less desirable), and less powerful.

In the novel, though, you can still tell that it’s a problem for society. I tried to put hints like this in a couple places, most noticeably at the end when we realize that no one goes camping anymore. Let me know if you wanted more hints like this, dear readers.

But at the end of the day, the central question is this: when you have something that gives you pleasure when you want it, do you need anything else? In a lot of ways, that’s the culmination of the utilitarian project, or even the human project.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but my answer is a resounding no.

But getting that across through the novel turned out to be a huge problem. There were a couple things in my way: first, I struggle a lot with characters being a mouthpiece for my ideas, without any life of their own. In the past, my characters have essentially been walking collections of ideas. I think I did better this time, but it still would be annoying to have one character just come out and say what I consider to be the answer.

Second, who would do it? What character has life figured out to that degree? Alexandria’s main struggle is with empathy and the over-important will (the old Palagianism problem), it was enough to her to merely understand the question in the first place. Miranda is a little closer, but she hasn’t grown enough to figure everything out. Adrian doesn’t get it at all, and Calvin wouldn’t either. And Alexander can’t figure it out. So who would say it? If I had more time to set up I could probably give it to Miranda, but as it stands, none of my characters are in places where they can figure it out.

Third, I think it’s nice if the author doesn’t necessarily come out and state the answer. Doing that too firmly makes it sound like a moral. I would have loved the reader to have to stare at this question themselves, and look deep down and try to figure it out for themselves. Because, in a sense, I think it’s a question that everyone really has to answer. Why do you go those good things that you do? It can’t just be because you get warm fuzzies for doing it, because you often don’t, and it’s just pushing the problem to a higher level.

I don’t know that I have much more to say without being a huge bore. I could go into certain themes that I tried to spin through the book, motivations for characters, etc., but I’m more interested in what you guys have to say.

So I have some questions for you, dear reader: did the main problem of the story really hit you the way I wanted it to? Did you have to think about it at all? If so, what is your answer, and if not, should I have pushed the problem more? Or is that a game you, as a reader, just don’t want to play? And if you don’t want to play it, should I explicitly give my answer at the end, or just hint at it and bring it up a lot more?

Other things I wouldn’t mind hearing feedback on are the characters. Was Alexander’s plight well established? Did you like the fact that Adrian was hard (I don’t think it was impossible) to figure out, or should he have been more understandable? Did the characters end up the way you think they should?

If you are going to comment, dear reader, and I really, really hope you do, please write out the answer to those questions. I’m not going to give you any of my answers, because I hope you can find it in the book or in yourself and I don’t want to prejudice you. But if you’re interested in my answers, feel free to pull me aside the next time you see me and ask, “John, what’s the meaning of life, and stuff like that?” I’ll happily oblige.