Epilogue-y Stuff.

Last night (or ~ more accurately ~ in the very early hours of this morning) I wrote the epilogue of AMEND.

Originally, it was the one book in the trilogy that was without an epilogue. I didn’t have any particular reason for this, other than the fact that less than 24 hours pass by between the end of AMEND and the beginning of TRANSCEND.

 I tend to use the epilogue as a place for characters to reflect. Reflection needs time to pass; otherwise it’s not quite reflective enough.

I had just finished fixing up the edits for the third draft of AMEND, when I realized the book didn’t feel quite…finished.

And so I thought why not write an epilogue? If it sucks, it can be removed. If it doesn’t, I’ve got a slightly longer book. It took me between half an hour and forty-five minutes to write it.

If it had been from the perspective of any other character, it wouldn’t have taken so long to write.

Although my books are written in the third person, I write the epilogue in the first person. That way, at the end of the book, you can really get into the character’s mind, see what they’re thinking and feeling.

In CONSEQUENCE, the epilogue was in the first person of Phoenix. 

Writing it was incredibly easy, because it was easy to get into her head. Out of all my characters, Phoenix is the one who’s most like me. That makes her the easiest to write, but also the one that annoys me most, because she has a lot of aspects of me that I don’t like.

My main character in AMEND is called Melinoe. She is horrible. I hated her for most of the book, until I realized that it was actually quite fun writing a character like her. I could push the boundaries of what a character could do or say, I wanted to see how far she had to go before people hated her.

In CONSEQUENCE, I had two main characters. For reasons to do with the last chapter, I couldn’t use Persephone for the epilogue, so I used Phoenix.

But in AMEND; although I have another sort-of-main character, Melinoe is the main one. So the epilogue had to be from her perspective. I didn’t realize how hard this was until I started writing it.

Most characters evolve over the course of a book, but Melinoe didn’t evolve very much.

She had learnt a few life lessons, but she was still Melinoe.

I don’t think anything could change her, because she’s very…confined to a certain way of thinking and being.

Yet I had to get into her mind ~ which, by the way, isn’t always that great a place to be.

When I was done, I was happy with what I had written.

But I think that in the process of writing the epilogue, I was trying so hard to write it, that I didn’t realize that I shouldn’t be writing it ~ Melinoe should. 

Every so often I would find a sentence that was completely Melinoe, and those were the sentences I kept. I removed everything that sounded too like me, and I made it all her.