To answer a question

I’m sure a few people are curious as to whether the reveal that (LEFT BEHIND SPOILERS TO FOLLOW) Ellie is gay/bi-sexual is going to affect anything in the Aftermath series.

The simplest answer I can come up with is this: not really.

I’ve actually never had any plans to have a romantic interest for Ellie.  To me, her infection makes her a very tragic character.  In my interpretation of the world, the nature of Ellie’s infection is such that she can infect other people she were to come in contact with via saliva or… other bodily fluids.

This has been my interpretation of it since day one.  If she had turned out to be straight up heterosexual, it would have gone down the same way.  Her story is a tragic one in that, as far as romance goes, she’s more or less condemned to be alone.  Is that sad?  Yes.  Tragic?  Absolutely.  Does it make me cruel to interpret things this way?  Possibly.

I interpret this as such for several reasons, one being that most romance stories involving Ellie in fan fics I’ve read either come across as really cheesy/forced/hamfisted, or just plain gross (JoelxEllie… *shudder*)  I wanted to keep this story tightly focused on the relationship between the two main characters, and romantic relationships outside of that would only, in a sense, distract or cheapen it.

I know, I know… you cry FOUL because of the whole Lakyn thing, right?  Well, look how that turned out.  About as bad as it could possibly have ended up, and it resulted in an enormous rift forming between Joel and Ellie, a rift that they will spend the majority of Part III trying to close.  Believe it or not, that was the intention from the get-go.  Yes, I’ll admit, part of the reason I brought that relationship into the story at all is to provide a breaking point for Joel, one that would give him a feasible reason to run away, giving me a plot point to drive Part III.

I’m sure there are people out there who don’t buy it.  Joel would never, ever leave Ellie.  I largely agree, but I thought to myself, what kind of things would have to transpire for him to leave her, and what would be his motivation for doing so.  The two main factors that provide a fitting answer to this for me are love and insanity.  Weird, right?  Joel loves Ellie so much that he would do anything to keep her safe, even if that meant separating himself from her to keep her safe from himself.  That’s where some degree of insanity comes in.  Joel’s clearly developed a noticeable amount of mental instability, and to actually believe in some cosmic curse that ‘everyone I love dies’ requires a degree of mental instability.

If you’re reading the series and hoping that these two will somehow find happiness in a romantic relationship (not with each other, obviously,) you can give up that thought now.  I’m spoiling it for you: there will be no romantic relationships for the rest of the Aftermath series.  This story will end with Part III, and I have come up with an ending that I’m pretty satisfied with, but it doesn’t involve either character finding a romantic, happy relationship.  Tough break, but that’s the way it is.

That post got kind of… meander-y, but oh well.

Oh, and as far as the two strangers we met in chapter five go, their story may or may not be finished.  I won’t say.

Jeff

Thoughts on Left Behind

The lone single-player, story-focused DLC for The Last of Us, called “Left Behind,” came out on Friday.  I’d been eagerly awaiting its arrival for months on end, and when Friday came, I made sure to take a half day at work so I could go home and beat it in one sitting.

What an experience.

FAIR WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US: LEFT BEHIND TO FOLLOW.  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

I had the misfortune of having a detail of the DLC spoiled for me when Polygon put up their review a day early (to the chagrin of Naughty Dog, mind you) and I was foolish enough to click on a link to it.  In the review, it said the story is intercut with scenes that take place during a gap in the Last of Us timeline.  There was also a picture of Ellie attacking a hunter in her “Neapolitan ice cream” jacket that she wears during fall, so I didn’t really need to guess as to which gap we’d be seeing more of.

That said, that surprise came at the very beginning of the DLC so it wasn’t terrible that it was spoiled.  It would have been a pretty great surprise, but oh well.

Sure, the run-time was fairly short, but I’ve always preferred quality over quantity, and boy, it did not disappoint in that regard.  When I finished the main campaign of The Last of Us, I was pretty stunned.  I thought it was interesting that the big “twist” ending is that neither character died, when in this genre one of them always does.  That’s just the way it is.  It took me quite some time to absorb the ending of The Last of Us, and it didn’t leave me nearly as awestruck at first as, say, Bioshock Infinite did.  But whereas my awe of Bioshock Infinite diminished a bit over time, my appreciation for The Last of Us’s daring and unorthodox ending only deepened.  Heck, it stuck with me so much I started writing fan fiction about it.  And this is someone who thinks fan fiction is probably one of the nerdiest/geekiest things you can do as a human being (don’t judge me, I’m already judging myself.)

The ending of Left Behind was remarkable.  Here’s what made it so amazing: unlike the end of The Last of Us proper, we already knew how this was going to end.  We knew Ellie and Riley were going to get bit and that Ellie would live and either watch her friend die or kill her herself.  Even in light of knowing what was going to happen, the ending hit me like a punch in the gut.  Not only was it emotionally resonant, it made me reconsider my feelings toward the ending of The Last of Us.

When discussing their options after being bitten, Riley says the following:

We fight.  There are a million ways we could’ve died today.  And a million ways we could die before tomorrow.  But we fight for every second we get to spend with each other.  Whether it’s two minutes… or two days… we don’t give that up.  I don’t want to give that up.

What makes this scene particularly powerful is how it cuts back to Ellie in the present day, about to ride Callus out of the mall she and Joel were holed up in, with Joel in tow on a makeshift sled.  She appears lost in thought as Riley’s voiceover continues.  She then steadies her resolve, and rides out, eventually to the Lakeside Resort where they take shelter.

The events with Riley in Left Behind all occur as a flashback, triggered by the fact that Ellie and Joel are taking refuge in a mall not unlike the one she lost Riley in.  This is obviously weighing heavy on Ellie’s mind while she searches for something with which to stitch up Joel’s puncture wound.  To see her reminisce on Riley’s words before setting out into the snow was incredibly powerful.  She was reminding herself to fight for every moment she can get with Joel, the only person in the world at that point who cared for her and whom she cared for, as was the case with Riley during that time in her life.

To me, this makes me rethink the ending of The Last of Us.  After hearing Riley’s words, and knowing that Ellie must have been thinking about them after Joel told her the lie about the Fireflies, I’m more inclined to buy into the idea that she knows he’s lying but wants him to lie to her.  I think if he had told her the truth, she probably would have felt like she would have to leave him right then, and I don’t think she wanted to.  I think she wanted him to lie because it confirmed for her that he, too, wanted to be with her.  She knows he’s lying, but perhaps understands that he does so because he doesn’t want to lose her.  That’s a sentiment she’s familiar with.  His lie also frees her from some of the survivor’s guilt she’s dealing with.

In light of this, I sort of wish I could rework some of her mental ruminations throughout the first half of Aftermath: Part II in a way that would reflect these feelings.  But what’s done is done.  I also looked back on the section in Part II where she’s telling Joel about when she stitched him up.  I got the part where her hands were shaking right, but I had her say she had never stitched anyone up before, which, if she’s to be believed in Left Behind, isn’t the case.  In fact, she’s “kind of an expert.”  Also had her say after she stitched him up, she stayed by his side for two days, when in Left Behind we see her towing him with Callus to the Lakeside Resort.  So perhaps this isn’t technically incorrect and is just me nit-picking, but I strive for accuracy.  I guess I’m just glad I got as much right as I did.  Happy coincidence!

The events of Left Behind, particularly seeing Ellie’s childhood “left behind” (eh?  EH??) are going to stick with me for awhile.  I have a new appreciation and a deeper understanding of her character, and it’s definitely going to affect how I approach writing her character in Part III.

I know that I’ve had her break down into tears several times in the Aftermath series, something we only really get a hint of once in the full game, but seeing her forlorn and sobbing after being bitten (and the expertly-executed animation of tears running down her face and her quivering lower lip)… man, that one cut deep.  I guess there’s a difference between writing something and envisioning it, and actually seeing it before your eyes.

The sentiment behind Riley’s speech at the end of the game is certainly going to play into Part III.  It’s actually quite handy for me because it fully defines Ellie’s motivations for hunting down Joel.  She’s fighting for every moment she gets to spend with him, and she clearly isn’t going to take his running away lying down.

I realize these thoughts probably read fairly scatterbrained.  Well, it’s because they are.  On these types of posts, I just let my thoughts out in a stream as they come.  But to sum this all up, Left Behind is pretty much everything I wanted from a piece of DLC.  If you haven’t played it yet, well, you should be reading this right now since I warned you about spoilers, but go play it.  I’m definitely looking forward to doing my second playthrough.  We’ll see how survivor difficulty treats me, especially during that last battle.  *shudder*

Oh, and for an update: I’ve started chapter 4 of Part III.  Hoping to finish it over the next few days as I split time between this and writing the novel and playing Left Behind again.

Jeff

The power of dreams

I think I can say with confidence that my favorite sequences to write in any of my stories are dreams.  They provide such unique opportunities to dig into the minds of your characters, as the dream-world can unlock and reveal some of the machinations of the subconscious that you just cannot illustrate in waking.

I bring this up in light of my latest chapter of the Aftermath series.  You can find it here.

About midway through writing the chapter, I decided that I wanted Ellie to fall asleep and experience a dream.  I began brainstorming ideas for the dream.  Just before drifting off, Ellie found herself missing Joel’s companionship and warmth as she shivered away in the attic of the abandoned house, having barely missed him.

She fell asleep thinking of him, and you brain begins to construct dreams by pulling from experiences, past and present.  In addition to thinking about him, she went to sleep rather cold.  To me, when I think of cold I think of death.  I thought to myself, what kind of dream would be impactful for her to experience that related to death.  I immediately thought back to one of Joel’s nightmares in Part I, where Sarah is killed but he opens his eyes to find Ellie instead.  I decided to take this concept and turn it on its head.

Now, people might say “hey, wait a hot minute.  Ellie wasn’t there!  She doesn’t know the specifics of how it happened!”  Fair point.  First off, she knows enough for her brain to manufacture the rest.  Joel told her how Sarah died in Part II.  As for how she could experience in a dream, nearly line for line, the entire prologue of the game from Sarah’s perspective?  Well, let’s just attribute that to some cosmic miracle.  That’s my answer and I’m sticking to it.

The interesting part is that Ellie has no agency in the dream.  Everything she says is simply parroting Sarah’s lines.  Ellie’s almost an observer who gets to feel the terror and pain that Sarah felt.  Often times your physical environment in the present world can manifest itself within a dream, hence the cold Ellie is feeling translating to death in the dream.

Another interesting twist on it is the disjointedness.  Dreams, when we try to remember them, often make little sense.  There are a couple moments in the dream where time and setting jump forward in tandem, which seems nonsensical because it is.  That’s how dreams work.

Also, I took care to always refer to the point-of-view character in the dream as “she.”  The only hint that it’s actually Ellie (that is, before Joel yells her name after she’s been shot) is the reflection of the scar she sees on her eyebrow in the reflection of his watch.

Oh, and on the watch, yes I realize when the truck crashed the watch was still intact.  It was shattered prematurely in the dream for purely metaphorical reasons.

Gah, I love writing dreams.  This isn’t the last dream we’ll be seeing in Part III.  Stay tuned for more!

Jeff

The demons to face

For a quick update: I’m roughly a fourth of the way done with Chapter 3 of Part III.  We’re back with Ellie in this chapter.  For people who haven’t noticed, I’m handling this in a similar fashion as winter was handled in the game, with the narrative jumping between the two characters.

So my idea for what these characters are going to face in Part III has a lot to do with what the characters are dealing with.  The demons they face in Part III are going to represent something significant.  I’m having a hard time putting this into words without explaining it explicitly, so I’m just going to do that.

I think I’m going to have a lot of the conflict Joel encounters be centered around two main concepts.  The majority of run-ins and conflicts he has to deal with are going to involve the Infected, reason being that their continued existence is increasingly on his head.  He could have chosen to let the Fireflies find a vaccine (yes, we don’t have to get into whether or not they would have successfully found one, it’s the concept of him robbing the world of a potential vaccine that I’m getting at here.)  Every run-in he has with Infected will serve as a prodding reminder that he could have put an end to this.  Whether or not this will be explicitly clear to him is yet to be seen.

In addition to the Infected, most of the rest of Joel’s conflicts will be incorporeal in nature.  If you haven’t caught on yet, his hallucinations of Marlene are going to persist, and she may not be the only character that ends up haunting him.  He will be plagued by nightmares as well, and is going to struggle with maintaining his sanity under the mental strain.

Ellie, in contrast, is going to deal with conflicts that are much more visceral in nature.  I think most of the conflicts she’ll face will be in the form of the elements and other survivors.  Sure, she’ll have her run-ins with the Infected from time to time, but demons from her past are going to come back to haunt her in interesting ways.  I don’t to go into further detail about what this means, as it’d definitely be spoiler-tastic, but needless to say, her run-ins with other people are going to expose a lot about who she is becoming.  I’m sad to say, as it’s quite tragic, that we’re going to see a lot of Joel’s demeanor come out in her.  This might end up being the saddest part of Part III, seeing Ellie become a hardened, ruthless survivor especially since she’s supposed to represent the good that’s left in humanity.  The fact is, in this world, the only people that survive especially outside of settlements are the hardened, ruthless survivor types.  It’s going to be tragic to see that transformation in her.

In other news, the DLC comes out on Friday and I’m pretty pumped to play it.

Alright, it’s getting late.  Time to go.

Jeff

Easter Eggs in Aftermath: Part I

You know, this is something I realized I’ve never explicitly mentioned, but there’s a fair amount of location-based Easter Eggs in Aftermath: Part I.  While writing that, I actually spent a good amount of time combing through Google Maps and trying to figure out what route these two would have most likely taken to get from where they were in Colorado (I approximated it as outside of Fort Collins) to Salt Lake City.  Once I decided what I figured was a likely route (they’d stick more or less to a highway so they’d have something to follow,) I peppered in several real-life locations into the story.  There’s overt ones, such as the Historic Elk Mountain Hotel, to subtle ones, like where they come across a road sign that says something like STRONG WINDS – NEXT 5 MILES.  That’s a real road sign that’s along that route.  I challenge you to find it.  The shootout in Sinclair?  There’s a real refinery there, and that scene was pulled directly from Street View data.  The main-street-style location that reminds Ellie of Bill’s town?  That exists too, and when I stumbled across it I was stunned.  It was almost a carbon copy, with the church steeple rising at the end of the main street.  Read that section closely and you should be able to find it using Street View.  There’s plenty of real-life locations peppered throughout, so give it a re-read and go scavenger hunting!

Life has been really busy lately and I haven’t had nearly as much time to write as I would like.  I work 8-5 every day and am relegated to writing in the evenings, and evenings are typically busy.  Every Thursday night I go out with some friends to get hot wings at a nearby bar.  Two of those friends are the two authors who are writing books with me, so we oftentimes use these nights to chat about the books.  These sessions are great, and we hash out a lot of details together to make sure everything is cohesive and makes sense.  It reignited some enthusiasm about the books for me, as my drive had started to wane as I got mired down in the current section.

I also came up with a pretty good scenario for Chapter 2 of Aftermath: Part III, so I’m definitely gonna get rocking on that and hopefully get it posted sometime this weekend.  I know people are getting anxious, but it’ll be worth the wait.  SPOILER ALERT: first appearance of a certain kind of baddie.

So yeah I hope to really get some writing done this weekend.  That’ll be really good.  Oh, and today is Friday, so that’s already really good.

Jeff

On the end of Aftermath: Part II

Last night I got an instance of something I haven’t seen nearly enough of during my time writing the Aftermath series: a truly critical review.  Whereas some people might bristle at this kind of review, I reveled in it.  Criticism is a very powerful tool that you can either use to hone your skills or let drag you down.  I’m choosing the former option.

The reviewer made some very good and valid points, and it became clear to me there were some areas where I could have better conveyed the scenarios I was going for.  Some of you might have seen the review and now have questions of your own.  I just wanted to offer a response to it because I think it raises some very important points, but I think some things were missed and that’s probably my fault as the author.

The first point the reviewer made, and certainly the most emphasized, was that Joel would never, ever do anything to put Ellie in danger.  Telling the bandits how to get into Jackson would contradict this fact, and that is where I wish I had written it differently.  I’ll come back to this later.

Tied into this point, the reviewer had qualms with how quickly Joel and Lakyn’s relationship had seemed to progress.  I’m going to come out and say what you’re all probably suspecting: I brought her character into the story with the full intention of having Joel care for her and having him eventually lose her.  This was the plan from the get-go.  I didn’t want to dwell too heavily on their relationship, as writing that kind of stuff isn’t really my forte, so I implemented some jumps forward in time (two of them if I’m not mistaken) in order to have their relationship progress.  So yes, as it read, it may have seemed to happen overnight, but in real-time, it had taken months for them to get to a point where each of them felt like they were ready for something more.  I don’t think I communicated this well because it may read that Joel just kind of dove in headfirst.  I had the intention of making both of them seem hesitant about it.

But let’s back up: how was this relationship even possible given Joel’s disposition?  He’s cold, ruthless, and shut-off emotionally, traits which I think he is putting on as a mask or survival tool to cover up how emotionally damaged he is.  In the beginning of the game, we’re given very little insight into his relationship with Tess, but we can garner a few things from what we see.  It’s left ambiguous as to whether or not they were romantically involved, but there are some hints that would indicate they were, at least to some degree.  These hints come out the most evidently when Tess is saying goodbye.  Her line about “there’s enough here that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me” is one indicator.  Joel’s response is another.  After he sees the bite, it’s evident in his face and his actions that she means a lot to him, more than he had let on up to that point, and initially he’s rather shocked about the whole ordeal.  It’s only after her incessant orders to leave her that he finally snaps back into the gruff persona and orders Ellie to “get a move on.”  Her death clearly affects him for some time, so I think it’s fair to say that Joel is capable, even after losing his daughter, to care about someone in that way even if he won’t admit it to himself.

Once he starts to grow closer to Ellie, we see his hardened shell start to erode, and by spring time, he’s borderline chipper.  Ellie had gotten him to open up emotionally in a way he hadn’t in years.  Now let’s fast forward to their settling in Jackson.  Up until this point, his prime directive has been simple: keep Ellie safe, no matter what.  In the grand scheme of things, Jackson is a safe place.  It’s arguably safer than the QZ in Boston where Joel and Tess lived.  On the ride back from the incident at the dam in Part II, Lakyn asks Joel if he’s capable of being close to someone, as in romantically.  Up until this point in the story, Joel had never given it any thought at all (at least in my mind) and he says as much in his response to her.  He says he hasn’t given it much thought and has more pressing matters at hand (i.e. keeping Ellie safe.)  To me, it’s reasonable that Lakyn’s question got some wheels turning in his head.  Maybe it is possible to have that kind of relationship again, now that he and Ellie are safe (so long as they stay within the town) and life is returning to some semblance of normalcy.

It is at this point that I have to bring up an exceptional take on the ending found in this video.  The guy discussing the ending brings up the point about Joel’s mental state.  He conjectures that at the end of the game, in Joel’s mind, he has reverted to a state where he never lost his daughter.  He and Ellie can go live and be happy in Jackson as a family, and I think it stands to reason that it’s at least feasible Joel could seek to add to that family given the right woman came along.  It could even be argued that he’s doing this to provide a mother figure for Ellie, though that’s not the argument I’m making.  After all, we have seen back in Boston that Joel isn’t completely opposed to developing some degree of intimacy with a woman, even if he denies it to himself.  Does the concept of forming a new happy family seem a little bit delusional?  Absolutely.  That’s the point.

So that’s my explanation to how Joel could find himself growing close to someone in a romantic sense: it’s all about the environment and circumstances.  He decided the conditions were right to try to connect with someone in that way again.

This brings us to the cabin and the bandits breaking in and beating both Joel and Lakyn.  Another point the reviewer brought up is that Joel was a hunter.  He knew how hunters and bandits operated, and he would have known that the bandits were never going to let Lakyn live.  They only needed one of them.  Chief even points this out to Joel in chapter 20.  The thing is, Joel did know.  Deep down, somewhere inside, he knew.  Thus, the visions of the spectres chanting You can’t save her.  That was his subconscious telling Joel that Lakyn was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it.

He was scrambling for a solution in which no one died in a situation where no such solution existed.  He ultimately chose the option that he hoped (foolishly, mind you) would delay the death of someone he cared about, giving him time to try to turn the tables.  I say it was a foolish hope because, as I said in the previous paragraph, he knew that wasn’t going to happen.  Perhaps it was the savage beating he had received that led to him not thinking clearly, but he clutched on to the hope that there was a way out of this where both Lakyn and Ellie lived.  That hope was extremely short lived and is extinguished when Paulson shoots Lakyn in the head.

So now we come to my instance of malfeasance: Joel telling the bandits how to get into Jackson.  What I should have had him do is lie to them, giving them a false way into town.  He would have to assume they’d bring him along until they were able to get into town and then kill him, so lying to them would have served him well: they might let Lakyn live, and he’d have more time to try to stop them before they could get into town and hurt Ellie.

It’s no accident, then, that this figurative “breach of trust” where Joel goes against his prime directive results in horrific consequences, and it’s that fact that leads to the end of Part II.  He realizes what happens if he strays from that path.  People he cares for are slaughtered, and once Lakyn is gone, Ellie is all he has left.  Yeah, I’m sure Tommy, and to a much lesser degree Maria, fall into that camp too, but they can take care of themselves.  Sure, Ellie can too, but Joel still feels the paternal instinct to protect her.

Some people might gather that his shock in the aftermath of Lakyn’s death is because he cared so much for her, and there is a degree of that, but it’s more of a period of realization to him.  He gets it into his head that “everyone I love and come close to ends up dead.”  It sounds really melodramatic, but can you blame him?  How many people dear to him has he lost?

I’m sure other people will be outraged at the concept of Joel seemingly abandoning Ellie at the end, but you have to look through the lens of his motivation.  He’s back to assuming the prime directive: keep Ellie safe, no matter what.  To him, given his realization, that means he now has to take himself out of the equation.  He honestly believes in his mind that if he stays close to Ellie, she’s going to end up dead because of him.  Is it a reasonable belief?  From the outside looking in, no.  But you have to understand that he’s just going off of the data he has.  To this point, he’s lost everyone he loves: his wife (thought separation or death, we don’t know but I’d lean toward the former,) his daughter, his partner (with at least some degree of romantic involvement,) and now a woman he thought he could make a part of their family.  I guess I can’t exactly blame him for extrapolating out and seeing it likely that Ellie will die on account of him.

He’s not about to let that happen, and he’s decided that he has to eliminate himself from the equation FOR THE SAKE OF HER SAFETY.  Is this a bit nuts?  YES.  I can’t stress this enough.  Joel is becoming mentally unstable.  Twenty years of surviving in that hell hole and losing loved ones would do that to anyone.  As it says in that video, we have examples of it throughout the game (Bill being the most prominent in my mind.  Bill has developed some level of schizophrenia.)  I have given hints of the concept of Joel’s mental instability throughout the Aftermath series: his haunted dreams and his waking visions of revenant Marlene, an embodiment of the dread he comes to realize at the end of Part II.  He can’t save Elile, and in his delusions he decides the best course of action is to kill himself.  The vision of Marlene shows up as the embodiment of dread and urges him to follow through, but something within Joel refuses to let that happen, and so he decides on the only other alternative: run.  Leave her in the better stewardship of his brother and sister-in-law and separate entirely.  He wholeheartedly believes this is the only way to keep her safe.  To him, it is an act of love.

I hope this has shed some amount of light on my choices in the ending of Part II.  I still think the reviewer has some good points, but some of them I disagreed with and have answered them above.  Feel free to discuss in the comments, I’d like to hear other opinions on the matter.

Jeff

Mulling about

I’m sitting at Spyhouse Coffee’s Northeast Minneapolis location, the location where I do roughly 90% of my writing, trying to push through this section of the novel.  Character development can be a sticky wicket.  I want to make something obvious and prevalent in the reader’s mind without being ham-fisted or repetitive.

My lead character is a rather misanthropic guy.  He never connected well with other people, and found most of their tendencies irritating and self-destructive.  In general, he just doesn’t like most people he meets.  He believes that all people are self-serving, even ones who hide it under a veneer of altruism (for lack of a better word.)  He has a thorough distaste for the power-hungry types.  He’s always kept to himself, embodying the “live and let live” outlook on life.

Fairly early on, I think in chapter 3, he meets a fellow survivor who also happens to be traveling alone.  Traveling solo is rather uncommon in the world of the novel for several reasons, so he is already kind of an odd duck, but to find a woman traveling by herself was even rarer still.  This female character is considerably more personable than he is, and on several occasions tries to get him to open up and give some indication that he has an emotional bone in his body.

This is what’s giving me fits right now.  It’s hard to try to accurately convey to the reader that this guy has so detached himself from the world.  He shrugs at profound comments, declines to answer most personal questions (and when he does, answers them in a factual fashion devoid of any heartfelt revelations,) and approaches every situation, even life-threatening encounters, with a cold, calculated calm that betrays the anxiety that dwells within him whenever his life is on the line.  There are hints here and there that this guy is indeed human, and that’s what the female character is desperately trying to reveal, but for the most part he’s kind of robotic.

I honestly think most people won’t connect with him well.  I think the secondary characters are going to be much more likable, relatable, and interesting.  This is actually a conscious choice, but I’m not going to reveal why.  I have a suspicion that, seeing as he’s the main character, people will still end up rooting for him, which I suppose is a good thing because I do want to have some sort of redemption of character for him.

Fact is, he is the way he is for a reason: it caters to survival, which is his utmost priority.

Shifting gears here, I have started Chapter 2 of Aftermath: Part III.  I’m only a paragraph or so into it, but the opening scene is taking shape.  Spoiler alert: we’re back with Joel to open Chapter 2.

A funny idea crossed my mind today.  Or at least, I think it’s funny.  I thought it could be interesting to introduce alternate universe versions of my main character and his companion into Part III.  Their dispositions would translate rather well into the world, and I can see Ellie running into them at some point and bantering with the woman, seeing as the main character isn’t too personable.  I know I would have a lot of fun with it.  We’ll see what happens.  They’d only pop up for maybe one chapter.  Who knows… maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t.  I’d probably get a bigger kick out of it than anyone else.

Alright, enough procrastinating.  I’m going to get back to work.

Jeff

And so begins Aftermath: Part III

Alright, so, I’ve posted chapter 1 of Aftermath: Part III.  If you somehow came here first, you can view it here.

Yeah, I know.  It’s really short, but prologues are allowed to be short, so lay off me.  I’m just kidding, lay it on, I can handle it.  In all honesty, I just wanted to get it started and the idea of a prologue to bridge Part II and Part III sounded appealing, so there you have it.

A reader of mine (fanfiction.net user name Ash-Wood95) gave me the suggestion of having Joel, in a fit of rage, burn down the cabin in which Lakyn was killed.  I liked the idea, and thought it might be effective to have Ellie stumble across the aftermath (heheheh title plug) of what Joel had done.  I thought this scene would make for a good prologue as Ellie sees the smoke from the burning cabin, her first heading toward finding Joel, and sets off after him.

So that’s really all there is to say about the prologue.  I’ll probably start chapter two in a day or two here.  I need to put in some work on the novel, which still sits at around 26,000 words and has been stuck around that number for a couple weeks.  This has definitely been my first writing slump of that project, and I need to shake it off, but life is so dang busy especially when you keep wanting to write TLoU fan fics.  Agh.  What can you do though, right?

Alright, I’m going to bed.

Jeff