afterword (just where it now lies I can no longer say)

The first thing you need to know about this is that it wasn't supposed to happen.

I'll be blunt here: This is the kind of AU I hardly ever read. Seriously. For the most part this is just not a storyline I'm all that interested in. There's nothing wrong with it; it's just not really my thing. I tend to prefer either fic set within the world of the show, or fic that features some kind of speculative element. I don't read contemporary romance, ever. I hardly ever watch romance as a film or TV genre. Clearly I'm on board the ship here, I just do often steer clear of this specific stuff for whatever reason.

I don't usually read AUs like this. I was never going to write one.

Then it happened.

This past year has been incredibly hard for me. I'm in a PhD program and my funding ran out, leaving me essentially unemployed. I haven't been able to find another day job (I have now); I've been stuck scrounging together whatever spotty income I can. I've been wrestling with some serious depression and anxiety. I've been feeling like maybe I wasted the last six years in grad school, like maybe this was a huge mistake, like maybe my life wasn't going anywhere and I was doomed to just be stuck for the rest of whatever, surviving and doing mostly sort of okay but never much better than that.

Over the course of the winter I spent a lot of time visiting my parents. They have a nice house and are very kind people, and they have a hot tub, and I spent a lot of time in that hot tub when I stayed there. Two things tended to happen over the course of those visits: I would write a tremendous amount of fic, and I would spend a lot of time in that hot tub thinking about what I was going to write next. It was sort of my relaxation/idea space.

So very late one night - around about two, probably - there I am in the hot tub, smoking and looking at the stars and listening to Josh Ritter's fantastic album Hello Starling, and his song "Kathleen" comes on. One of my faves. Tells the story of this party and this girl and this guy who's smitten with her, and how he's not cool enough to get near her - this girl who's so beautiful she's untouchable (all the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights), but he can do one thing for her. He can drive her home. And that one thing, that's better than all the parties in the entire fucking world.

and I'll have you back by break of day
I'm going your way anyway
if you'd like to come along
I'll be yours for a song

So I think, "Huh. That's a cute story. That might be a cute little one-shot. Not my thing at all, but let's give it a go and see what happens, see if I can do it at all well."

The result was what eventually became chapter 1. I posted it, and Mollie went nuts in the tags and started yelling ideas at me and I thought "Well, okay, yeah, writing that was fun and there might be more of a story here, let's see what it is."

So chapter 2 happened.

And very shortly after that is when things got completely out of hand.

This story has utterly consumed my imagination for the last half year. Literally not one single day has gone by where I wasn't at least thinking about what I was going to write next. I have never in my life been so immersed in a world. I have never in my life written something that came so smoothly and so easily, at least most of the time - that really did seem to almost be writing itself.

That feeling was intensified tenfold when people started pointing all this stuff out and saying they thought it was cool - little turns of phrase, callbacks, repetitions, coincidences, connections, imagery, themes. Threads that tie this whole thing together in an incredibly complicated webwork that all somehow manages to harmonize.

And I didn't mean for most of it to be there. It just came. I had no idea a lot of it was there until people pointed it out to me, or I went back and reread later and saw it.

I can't stress this enough: that has never happened to me before.

None of this has.

I'll Be Yours For a Song began as a cute little one-shot which became an odd and vaguely quirky romance-thing, but it rapidly became something much, much bigger. It started to be about family. It started to be about pain and trauma and the agony of growing up, and what happens when you simultaneously aren't allowed to do so and are forced to do so much too quickly. It started to be about mental illness, about scars, about recovery. It started to be about healing and about how much it can hurt to heal. Most of all it started to be about love, and not just romantic love. It started to be about learning to love yourself, to love the world, to recognize that your life is wild and precious and as far as we know you only get one.

It's about Beth and Daryl, and Beth is really the heart of the whole thing, but ultimately it's about Daryl and Daryl, and how it all comes back together again.

I know this all sounds terribly pretentious, and it is. I've been wrestling with this the whole time I've been writing it - the feeling that this story is so incredibly personal, so much bigger than I expected, so much more important, that in a lot of ways it may be the story I've been trying to write all my life... And it's just fanfiction. And it's just a story and it's just one of many many other stories every bit as good.

Except I don't believe stories are ever just stories.

Here's what this thing did to me: I didn't want to finish. I cried at the thought of finishing, and I cried very hard and very frequently as I wrote the final chapters. Yet again: that has never happened to me before. I've never been so lost in the world of a story that imminent departure was gutting.

And the strangest and most painful and most wonderful part of it was that I knew it was right. "Well, just don't stop writing if you don't want to stop writing." No, I had to. This was the end, and it was the only end there could have been, and it was time.

I knew very early on that it was going to end this way, long before I had any kind of clear picture of how I would get there. This is how I tend to write: I have a starting point, I have an ending, and I have a rough plan of what I want to accomplish in between the two. The terrain itself remains mostly a mystery. I enjoy that, because it helps keep me surprised, which helps keep me interested. If it's a good story and I'm telling it well, I often find myself writing simply because I have to know what happens next.

(This is why I've been fanpersoning this thing so hard; I really don't feel like I wrote it a lot of the time. I just love it a lot of the same way a reader would.)

So I'm often surprised. But this fic... This story surprised me constantly. Events. Dialogue. The appearance of certain characters (I always intended to keep the inclusion of the show characters to a minimum and not to force anything, and I had no clue Rick and Shane were coming until they decided to show up). Some of it I had no idea was coming until a chapter or so before it did, and I know that's not so unusual, but much of it I had no idea was coming until literally five seconds before I wrote it. A textbook example is the appearance of the crystal wolf in the apartment the first time Daryl and Merle go to look at it. Had no idea it would be there. In my head a camera panned up and there it was. It startled me. Badly.

Freaked me out a tiny bit, in fact. That happened a lot.

But I knew the ending. It was very clear - very visually clear. I had a soundtrack for it right then; as I said in the notes for the previous chapter, I knew Glen Hansard's "This Gift" was simply The Song that had to go with it, and in fact that song guided a huge amount of the pacing of how the final sequence was written. It's written to be read with the song in mind.

The one thing that worried me was how to make it make sense without being overly trite, that Daryl would leave Beth and then return to her. That he would be willing to do that, and that his decision to turn around at the last minute would be reasonable. Initially the truck was going to break down, but then the idea of a crash asserted itself, a kind of near-death, and that felt right.

The appearance of Merle came much later, much more recently, and was obviously inspired by his scene in "Chupacabra". Though of course he's kinder here.

But the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place as I was writing it. Really when I finished and looked back. Daryl's anger at not being allowed to choose when Merle left him, his anger at not being allowed to be part of the decision. His sense that he was being treated like a child. That he was being abandoned.

He's doing exactly that. Making the same mistake. Merle had to be the one to talk him out of it, and to make his decision make the sense it needed. No one else would do.

And then the rain. That I also knew very early. That this story was a cycle, a Mobius strip, that it was going to end where it began in the most joyful way possible. That there would be summer in the midst of winter, and that the final line of the story would be the first line of chapter 1 - a mirror.

Not a broken one.

And why all the coy-playing? Why the end of the last chapter? Why that much pain? Because again, it felt right. It felt like what the story - and Daryl - needed. Regarding my behavior, all I can tell you is what I may already have told you, and what I said in this post (note: it's pro Team Delusional if that matters):

A good storyteller strikes a balance between two extremes - between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, darkness and light. And - this is very very important - uses those contrasts to intensify the effect of each thing. Greater sorrow means greater joy. More intense pain means more intense pleasure. Deeper darkness leads to more brilliant light. Each thing complements its counterpart, and the resulting harmony serves the story. But storytellers don't like telling you what goes where, or even what will happen, because we want you to take the journey with us. We want you to experience the depth of the sorrow so you feel the fullness of what comes after. We want to make you happy; we want that happiness to be as powerful as it can be. We want you - to crib from C.S. Lewis - to be "surprised by joy". If you knew for a fact that it was coming… Well. Do you see what I'm saying? We infuriate you on purpose, but not simply to infuriate you. We infuriate you because we want to make you so goddamn happy in the end.

I didn't want you to know. I wanted you to be surprised by it. I wanted you to feel the dark, so the light would be brighter. I hope that worked. If not, I truly apologize, and thank you for coming this far with me anyway.

I'm guessing some of you are also disappointed to be leaving Daryl and Beth here, with hardly anything actually resolved and their future still so much in doubt. All I can do is tell you that again, when stories are over they're over, and if you're writing them it's best to accept that and let them go.

I've known for a while that the story was going to end in this place, so I've also known for a while that there was a lot we simply weren't going to be told. But for me, that fit, because this ultimately isn't a story about everything working out and being fine and settled, even in the sense of knowing about stuff and having all your questions answered. I think, among other things, it's a story about not knowing about stuff, about learning to be okay with not knowing about stuff and pushing forward anyway on the faith that you're doing the best you can. Daryl doesn't know if this is going to work; neither does Beth. Both of them are aware that the odds are against them. But both of them also believe in the goodness of being willing to try, even if things don't end the way you hoped, because trying has value in and of itself, as does the hope that serves as its foundation.

One of my favorite lines of film dialogue is from The Shawshank Redemption (adapted and directed, ironically, by Frank Darabont): Remember, Red: Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Daryl is now brave enough to try, to accept the very real risk of failure and to regard that failure as not necessarily a failure at all. Beth is the same. This story has been in part the story of their journey to that point, and as such that part of the journey is now over and a new one is beginning.

I don't know what the end of that journey will be. Authors don't always know everything. One thing the process of writing this has taught me is that I often know very little about my own stories - or I've known very little about this one until after the fact - and that finding the faith and the courage to throw yourself into a project without much in the way of planning or hard information can result in rewards, albeit not always the ones you wanted or expect.

I've been asked more than once about a sequel. There will be no sequel; this story is over. I've packed up my truck, said my goodbyes, and left town. I don't expect to return to this world again. That's very sad for me, but it's also satisfying, to know that I've seen my part through to the end and I'm taking my leave when and where I should.

I'll miss these people so much. I'll miss Daryl. I'll miss riding around in his head, I'll miss his company. He was very odd company a lot of the time, sometimes difficult, but always wonderful. He became a friend. And yes, I'll write him again many times, but it won't be this one. This one is special.

I won't ever see him again. That's hard.

(Great, I'm crying again)

But he'll be all right. He's nuts, but he'll be all right. It's very good to know that.

And in many ways I won't see you again. There will be other stories, of course, and I hope you'll see me there and we'll travel together for a while, but it won't be like this. It won't be the same.

(Great, I'm crying again)

I'll miss you. You also were wonderful company. If this was special, if the last half year was extraordinary, it was because you were along for the ride, window down, radio on, making dolphin arcs in the wind.

So thank you for that.

Not a lot else to say.

Here's the Road. Let's see where it goes.

3/15/15 - 8/31/15