My latest work in progress—Book Ten in my oeuvre—has been a bit of struggle to properly plot, and all this blood, sweat, and not a few tears has been over one character, 17-year-old Wade Bright, an oversized, big-hearted young man who dreams of possessing the love of a beautiful girl.

You would think, after nearly ten years of established authorhood, and untold HOURS of steady labor at my craft, I’d have this plotting bit down, but the truth is, getting this particular story right has been a REAL challenge, in part because I didn’t want to do what needed done, that is, give one of my main characters less than the HEA I felt he deserved.

A little background about my book. Strange Companions is a science-fiction adventure story in which a crew of aliens joins forces with a quintet of social misfits to reshape a fictional southern California city called Callisto Sands.

Essentially, this is a utopian story, in which the characters must overcome certain inborn limitations in themselves to assume the role of the leaders of their community. A story best summed up in its recurring mantra, TOGETHER WE CAN BUILD A BETTER WORLD.

The story is split into four narratives which weave into each other as the story progresses. We can ignore the story lines involving former actress Rae Burns and her companions, delivery drivers, Jayden and Aiden Mason, because their story didn’t require much work to craft. It has stayed largely the same through multiple amendments and restatements of the story’s outline.

Returning to Wade once more. His story was a version of Beauty and the Beast in which Beauty turns out to be, if not an outright villain, at least not the belle the beast assumed her to be at the outset.

For a heartbeat, I considered allowing Wade to win his girl, but it didn’t feel right. Possibly because it wasn’t realistic. Yes, sometimes homely rock stars can get the models of their dreams (no names, but you knew who). Such rare exceptions aside, in real life, how many times does the ugly dork win the heart of cheerleader every jock on the football team desires? It goes against tradition, possibly nature, for people not yet old enough to vote to have the spiritual and emotional wisdom to see that an unattractive person can be beautiful on the inside, if you’re only willing to look.

Wade’s dream girl is kind to him. She even gives him—however briefly—what he desires. Or so it would seem. But all the while she is desperately in love with another boy, a fickle-hearted fellow classmate of slight account who she once saved from drowning when they were both kids. She has a soft spot for the boy she saved, especially now he has grown into an attractive young man whose exotic Spanish looks and fine manners make him, at least on the outside, Wade’s superior.

Enter a rival for Wade’s love—a fellow classmate recently arrived from Knoxville, Tennessee, who’s been crushing hard on Wade since the moment he first saw Wade.

In earlier drafts of Strange Companions, Wade ends up with Bobby Rivers, who Wade realizes cares for him in a way Ursula (the beautiful girl) never will.

Great, but—

Bobby Rivers proved as much a problem for me as Wade himself. Initially, Bobby was Wade’s lifelong friend, who admitted on his eighteenth birthday that he was in love with Wade, while the pair were on a daytrip in Tijuana.

The problem with this version of Bobby was he was too much of a friend to Wade, who proves himself not only a callous asshole (for not cottoning on to Bobby’s feelings before this burning revelation) and also for failing to take Bobby into his confidence, when he realizes he has become the companion, possibly host, of a being from another world. If they’ve been friends for most of their lives, why would Wade suddenly shut him out?

In the next version of the story’s outline, Bobby underwent a transformation. He was no longer Wade’s bestie since grade school, but a new arrival to Callisto Sands. Son of a preacher, assigned to a new parish, Bobby Rivers had an entirely new past. He was no longer the eldest son of the man Wade got repair work from, but a former child actor who nearly died at the hands of pedophile who attempted to kidnap his girl co-star. By this act of selflessness, Bobby became the ersatz son of the girl’s millionaire/billionaire father, with resources and connections his real father deeply resented.

 This version of Bobby proved too powerful to suit me. Also, he was a bit distracting, since he was far more interesting than Wade himself. Never make more interesting SIDE characters. Your readers will wonder why they aren’t on center stage?

 Bobby underwent yet another transformation to make him more suitable. Now he was simply the son of an entrepreneur who’d spent two decades traveling around the United States attempting and failing to run an overpriced healthy foods grocery store.

Bobby, his mother and younger sister Blossom are repeatedly and relentlessly bullied by this overbearing man, who blames his repeated failures on anyone but himself. Having made a pact with God to live a “godly” life, he refuses to allow Bobby to be himself (i.e., date the person he chooses).

 So far, so predictable. There are untold numbers of novels that feature a main character in love with an unattainable or ultimately unkeepable person, who realizes, during the course of the story, that he or she is better off (and far happier) with the best friend who’s supported him or her through all that heartache. HFN or HEA. Your choice.

 In this instance, however, I was less than satisfied with the outcome. If Bobby is the far better choice, what took Wade so long to figure that out? Why did he continue to chase after a girl who is so obviously in love with someone else?

 That is bad enough. Add to that the loss of emotional impact when Wade loses the girl he loves. In a later chapter, when the boy Ursula loves asks Wade to give her up, he sullenly refuses, despite his growing feelings for Bobby, a situation that makes him appear not only petty but also brutally unkind to the girl he supposedly loves and the boy who loves him.

 Some serious structural changes needed to happen to make Ursula’s loss as impactful as I intended. That meant Bobby had to go. Sorry. Not out of the story. Just out of Wade’s potential list of lovers.

 Strange Companions has several pivotal story points. One of the major ones involves a school dance called the Yule Ball, which Wade attends or skips depending on which version of my outline you look at.

One constant is this—Ursula attends the dance with Diego, the boy she truly loves, not Wade, though she is technically “dating” Wade at the time of the dance. She has previously promised Diego to be his date.

The evening turns into a disaster for Ursula and Diego, not only because Ursula makes a bad first impression on Diego’s parents, but also because their fellow classmates shun them at the dance. The Yule Ball is a kind of musical chairs in which you change partners, filling your dance cards with the names of your partners (the more popular the better). By universally shunning Diego and Ursula, their fellow students are telling them just how unpopular they are.

In some versions, Wade swoops in to save Ursula from this ignominy. In other versions of this same scene, Bobby steps in to save her. Or fails to step in to save her, depriving him of Wade’s respect. Ultimately, I felt that it might be best, considering the story, if I let Ursula get a taste of her own unwelcome medicine. She learns by hard experience that Diego cares more about his own pride (he won’t let anyone drive him away from the dance, even if he is having a miserable time at it) than Ursula’s feelings (he should have taken her away, as she asked, sparing her embarrassment and unhappiness).

In the latest version of my story’s outline, Bobby has his own difficulties at the dance. A good-looking boy he’s long secretly admired asks him to dance. Because he’s afraid the news will get back to his father that he’s danced with a boy, he lies, telling the boy he already has a partner for the coming song, then slips into the toilet to hide. His friend, Chet finds him there and gives him a pep talk. Chet and Bobby dance the next song together. While dancing, Chet kisses Bobby, presumably to help him to overcome the fear of “coming out” to their classmates.

When Bobby returns home later, his father throws him out of the house, ostensibly for failing to show up for his shift at the grocery store, as ordered, but, in reality, because Bobby has kissed a boy.

Bobby moves in with Wade, but his feelings for Chet are no longer that of only a friend. He soon realizes that Wade was just a crush. Chet is the person he really wants to be with. A near-death experience on a lake cruise brings Bobby and Chet even closer together, leaving Wade without a significant other.

What to do? What to do?

In the next two versions of my outline, I played with some rather unconventional happy endings for poor NOT-so-little Wade.

To help you understand the first, I need to give you a little background on the Strange Companions story not yet covered. It is loosely part of The Dark Brethren series as The Other Tommy (2018) was before it.

Seker’s Brethren don’t make a tangible appearance, but their meddling is, nonetheless, in evidence. Also, we get our first glimpse of the mechanism that Seker (Death) possibly used to create his bearers, creatures of ash who can assume physical forms at will. An as yet nameless Protectorate engineer falls into a machine he is using to manipulate matter only to become a part of amalgam he’s creating.

One of the major themes explored in Strange Companions is where do we draw the line between a tool and a “person”. Protectorate orgtech is sentient. As such, capable of exercising its own will and making value judgments. And it makes those judgments on a regular basis throughout the story, banishing people it considers threats to the better good, among other acts that readers may or may consider unethical for a technical “machine” to make.

If we care to make the old chicken/egg argument once more with the same result, we could ask ourselves, does the man make the tool or does the tool make the man? I put this perhaps more eloquently in the below introduction I wrote for the story:

If there is one dream which we, the citizens of this planet, share, it is of empire. Our tools, given tongues, tell the tale far better than we. Long after we are gone, they will serve as witnesses to our struggle for mastery. They helped us build a better world.

In one version of the story, which I discarded even before I edited the outline, Wade becomes the partner of the disembodied engineer. This created a whole host of difficulties with the plot that don’t need to be reiterated in detail here, chief among them the sudden appearance of a “person” who could tell the hapless misfits the aliens they have formed symbiotic if not parasitic relationships aren’t going to enslave/kill them.

An undercurrent of body horror (I am being altered on the inside by an alien who claims it is acting in my best interest) that runs through the story is entirely spoiled when a representative of that civilization shows up to explain everything. A sort of deux ex machina that solves all difficulties.

One of the charms of my story, in my opinion, is the tentative bond of trust each character builds with his or her companion. In Wade’s case, his metallic counterpart, Au.

In my childhood, I watched Under the Mountain, a miniseries in an anthology program called The Third Eye, which aired on the Nickelodeon in 1983 and 1984. In Under the Mountain, twins Rachel and Theo Matheson formed a symbiotic relationship with “magical” stones they used to focus their physic powers. Theo’s emotional weakness prevents him from fully expressing his powers, leading to the death/end of physical existence of his mentor, Mr. Jones.

Theo was the weak link in a chain required to build a bridge to defeat the enemy. In Strange Companions, Wade Bright is the weak link in the chain. Unlike the other members of the “crew,” Wade has difficulty learning to trust his companion. The alterations Au makes to Wade’s physical form only make Wade that much more self-conscious. These include tattoos that cover Wade from neck to foot, leaving only his hands from the wrist bare.

Wade also has a weak heart, which makes him physically unfit for the role he’s been given in the city’s reconstruction. Au’s attempts to preserve Wade’s life through enforced periods of rest only further alien Wade, who resents the loss of physical control over his own body.

But I do digress.

In the version in which Wade becomes the domestic partner of the disembodied engineer, the story closes with him aboard the orbital satellite, working side by side with this faceless entity. Sweet, but not quite—well, right.

In the next iteration of the story, Wade acquires a baby. Yes, a baby. First courtesy of the nameless engineer, then of Au. This baby is generated from a sample of Wade’s sperm, using Protectorate technology, because Wade really didn’t need a significant other. He just needed a family. Content with little Copper, his baby, he accepts the loss of Ursula and Bobby with some regret, but no pain.

Great, but—

The problem with introducing a baby into a story is they don’t disappear when they are no longer convenient. What did I do with the baby, once I had her? Who took care of her while Wade was at school? At work? At play? Also, how did he explain the baby’s existence to anyone who saw her? A whole host of story problems came out of this solution.

Back the drawing board.

Followed a series of female love interests which included a pretty girl with a bum leg, an ex-friend of Ursula’s, and a mischievous vlogger who made life miserable for Wade before falling in love with him. It scarcely bears repeating that all of these girls failed to suit because they brought the same problems to the story that Bobby had, not to mention cluttering an already busy tale with yet another side character.

If we introduce Ms. Right Choice at the beginning of the story, what do we do with her until we need her? If we wait to introduce her to Wade until she’s needed, then we have to take the time to build her (adding several more chapters to an already pretty lengthy story), so that isn’t going to work either.

Back to the drawing board.

Again.

Maybe I’m failing to find my way out of this mess because I’m looking for the wrong signposts. What am I trying to achieve? A happy ending for Wade. Okay. And that seems to be giving him a love interest, because that’s what he wants, right? To know what it is to love and be loved?

Is it? Really?

When trying to find the perfect ending, we sometimes sacrifice a good one. What if the end Wade needs is not a TRUE lover, but the ability to live WITHOUT one?

In my latest, and let us hope final, ending Wade becomes ONE with the amalgam he’s discovered (and cultivated)—an amalgam superior to anything the Protectorate has yet created called draconium 12-5. The same amalgam that the deceased engineer was working to create at the time of his death on Polaris, untold generations ago, which Wade has perfected himself.  

Wade gives himself up to it, becoming so much more than he could ever be without it. The ultimate evolution—and a wholly satisfactory ending.

Even if it doesn’t end with a kiss.

What do you think?

by

The post The Best Ending Vs. The Perfect Ending first appeared on MDWiselka.