Well, here we are! To all two people who stuck it out to the end, I offer my sincerest gratitude. I hope the read was as enjoyable for you as it was miserable for me.
I'm really happy I finally got the epilogue out. I can honestly say it was one of the only works I ever took pride in. I really felt that single, final chapter was the peak of my writing capabilities and my lackluster ability to present real, authentic emotion. It also seemed to have been the one chapter the people who read my original physical manuscript look back on and say, "wow, that was good." So I'm glad I managed to get this out to the world before I croaked.
The sub-title, "Strange Highways," is, like all of my other titles, a song reference. This time a song by the same name from a band called Dio. It's hands down my favorite song of all time, and a very personal and very painful song for me. I felt it only fair to give my favorite song the honors of being a part of my favorite chapter.
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I hope you'll pardon me being prose, here. So I'm going to use this space here to just kind of detail some more behind-the-scenes stuff, the future (or lack-thereof) of the series, and talk a little about how and why I went in the direction I did.
The Misanthropist's Guide to Philanthropy was initially made to be a 3 volume series, with 2 books coming after it (a prequel and sequel but not written from Zien's perspective). In a perfect world I would have loved to have been an author full time. Sadly, I feel the kind of material I'm interested in writing is not very conductive to the modern reader's….shall we say tastes? (haha, don't mean to be derisive.) If I was successful, I even had aspirations of doing like a "MGP vol 1.5" where I'd just sort of pen more random shorts.
I will admit, in my hubris, that when I first sat down and wrote this I fully expected I'd be able to get it published through more traditional means. I was thinking old fashioned print, like Penguin Publishing or something like that. Like I said in the preface, I'm kind of just behind the times and getting old in this way.
I don't think I'll ever make any money off of MGP, and I don't know if I'll ever make it around to writing volume 2/3, either. I'd love to, but I just don't see it happening. My writing doesn't cater to the current market, and I'm not willing to compromise on my creative liberties for a quick buck. I just have lost all steam. I currently work a 45-50 hr work week AND teach martial arts. On top of time being a major issue, general life is also a fucking bitch.
To put things into perspective, between the time I wrote this novel 8-10 years ago and now, I've attempted suicide twice (one time got the cops involved, the other time I was found and "saved" by the only woman who ever loved me…who then dumped me because she couldn't watch me off myself). I work at a dead end job, just making enough to pay rent and support my sister, and life is just…great. I'm almost 30 now and have had my dreams and aspirations crushed under the weight of the world, if this novel wasn't suggestive enough. Not asking for an emotional blowjob, just leveling with you all.
As much as a part of me wants to finish what I started, I really need to get my life in order before I even consider finishing MGP. I'd need financial security (which would be awesome if writing could help with that, but unless someone reading this can help me sell my books…hah.) and I'd need the promise of, more than anything, satisfaction. I put a lot of hate into this book. I was passionate, even if it was a negative passion. Nowadays, I'm just an old man falling into suicidal nihilism.
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But enough about that; you want to know what happens, right? I've never stopped thinking about the series I crafted. I daydream about it, even now! In my head I've already written 4/5 other books. I've thought of scenes. I've thought of poignant and emotionally charged dialogue. I've thought of how it all works together in the greater narrative and know EXACTLY how it's all going to play out.
I won't spoil too much, because if I do ever get back into it, I want to be able to present my readers with something fresh – but considering that is only a possibility, I can at least tell you the basic premises of my other ideas.
Volume 2/3 would effectively be a continuation of the story after the events of the epilogue. I didn't EXPLICITY state this, it should have been fairly obvious to anyone paying attention throughout the book (particularly the very beginning and the epilogue), but the current reality Zien inhabits is none other than our own. The events of the story are him reviewing his memories over the course of a day, taking place in the ruins outside of Washington D.C. He has, for unknown reasons, destroyed our Earth.
I wanted to make Vol 2/3 in a similar vein – of him reminiscing his life and what brought him to this low – but this time I wanted to wind it back only about a hundred and fifty or so years. Vol 2 starts off 100 years after the end of the epilogue. The first chapter will be written from the third-person perspective of a little Australian boy who has basically grown up in the apocalypse. I want him to meet Zien, who decimated the human population of Earth but did not cause them to go extinct, and get him to tell him why he did it.
At this point, Zien's psyche is demolished. He's a simmering coward who revels in self-loathing at all he's done. While he doesn't think he can justify himself to the boy, he humors the kid and tells him about the events leading up to the apocalypse.
And that's basically how I set up both vol 2 and 3. They will take place as Zien tells the boy his story; more specifically the two stories that finally tipped him over the edge and caused him to decimate the planet. Volume 2 will take place roughly 150 years prior to him meeting the boy.
At the time of me finishing Vol 1 of MGP there was an extremist organization known as ISIS starting to gain traction in the middle-east. This was before they had almost conquered Syria, but after we here in the U.S. started considering them a tangible threat. I decided to kick the whole second volume off with a "what if" scenario. That being: "What if ISIS conquered the middle-east and America ended up engaging in a full-scale war?"
And so that's where Vol 2 would have started. At the time, the "distant future of 2016" was my setting. Zien had fought in and regretted taking part in the ISIS-American war. He, along with another disillusioned veteran named Warren, started a mercenary organization stationed in Dubai in the aftermath of the war, along with Warren's sister and a few other colorful characters.
They would eventually pick up a Chinese-American woman named Rebecca who was working with Somalian pirates as a hired gun. She was going to be the first big driving force of the story. She was a loud mouthed, foul tempered, belligerent woman with violent tendencies, but a phenomenal sniper and decent laborer. Because Zien's the only one jaded and reserved enough to work with her, he often gets jobs as her spotter or team-mate.
I won't say what happens, but that one story is going to be the primary focus of Volume 2. I felt that Vol 1 did a good enough job of introducing Zien to the reader, and I wanted to write some fully fleshed out stories next. So going forward, I had planned to abandon the "short story" format, and keep a consistent cast of characters. At least per book. So volume 2 was going to be centered around Zien's exploits with Maelstrom (the mercenary organization) and, in particular, Rebecca.
I wanted to do with Rebecca what I couldn't with Nassaux, from "Forked Tongue." I wanted to create a very real, very compelling, and very damaged character and have said character be the focus of a whole story. No more throw away characters, no more one-note exposition vessels… I wanted to make a real human drama, and really sell it.
Now, Volume 3. A similar thing. This time it takes place after Zien leaves Maelstrom. Because of events that happen at the end of Vol 2 Zien decides to help another member of his group take down Boko Haram in Nigeria, who had kidnapped and murdered his sister. They join a Nigerian resistance group and take the fight to the extremists.
During the events of the first chapter or two of this book, Zien eventually finds himself in the…"guardianship" of an infant girl whose parents had likely died in the crossfire. Unable to bring himself to leave or kill the poor girl, he steals her away and flees the country.
Volume 3 takes place over the course of this girl's whole life. It'll kind of be a slower burn than either Volume 2 or 1, as the focus of the story will really be on Zien trying to provide a decent life for this girl whose life he likely ruined. It'll be a tumultuous story in which he tries to put aside and/or juggle his anger, trauma, and misanthropic outlook on life for the sake of his adopted daughter.
I really want Volume 3 to be an emotional rollercoaster, full of highs and lows. Not just a cynical, massive downer like most of my work. I think that'll be what makes the ending all the more beautiful.
As I'm sure you can probably guess, magic and the like will be taking a MAJOR back-seat in vol 2/3. It wouldn't make much sense for there to be a super-powered borderline god in our world and none of us heard about it, yeah? The Shadow will act, as it always has in MGP, as the great inhibitor of the story. Zien will be very much be nothing more than "a soldier boy," as Rebecca jokingly called him, and the fantasy elements of Volume 1 would be almost non-existent.
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As for the rest of the series, I had a few ideas. Two pretty much "set in stone" as my head canon, and a couple of off-shoot book ideas I toyed around with. The two main ones I saw as the conclusion of the series were the prequel and sequel. Oddly enough, though Zien's story has a definitive ending in the sequel, neither prequel nor sequel would feature him as the protagonist.
Rather, the prequel would kind of answer a lot of the questions I'm sure people had while reading volume 1 of MGP. Like, "Who is this Judith person and why is she important?" "Why does he keep mentioning characters like we're supposed to know who they are?" or "What happened between him killing those two women and him waking up in another world?"
The main character of the prequel would be Johan. I mentioned him a couple of times in MGP. He is a militiaman and guard of a sleepy hamlet. For reasons that would remain unknown throughout the story, a man named Duke would effectively terrorize the entire world, eventually destroying Johan's town. Johan and his sister would set out to exact revenge on this monster of a man. Eventually they'd party up with Zien, Judith, Yvonne, and his old mentor in an epic that would set the stage for the end of the series.
The prequel and sequel would definitely fall under the category of "high fantasy." When I first started writing as a teen, that's really what I wanted to do. I loved Robert Jordan and Tolkien and the like as a kid, and wanted to take a crack at it. It wasn't until I started growing older that I started working on the fucked up book now known as "The Misanthropist's Guide to Philanthropy."
Finally, the sequel…Where it all started. As I said in the preface, the sequel was the very first time I started writing what would eventually become MGP. I'm not going to discuss that here, as I already gave a brief synopsis there, but yeah… That's, in a perfect world, how I wanted this series to progress and conclude.
I also had a couple of other, silly ideas. One I really liked was a story where Zien joins a pirate crew headed by a spunkly little girl with no direction in life, but a hell of a lot of charisma. Think One Piece, but less "power of friendship" and more "misfit family" with my signature brand of cynical sardonicism.
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But…yeah, I guess that's it, huh? Kind of cathartic, in a way. I kind of realize now, a tad too late, that Webnovel is probably not the best place for this novel. I'm not writing yet another "system cultivation south Korean LGBT fanfic romance harem battle" novel with a bland self-insert protagonist, and the stuff my old ass grew up reading and loving is antiquated garbage by this generation's standards. Poe, Chang'en, Twain, and Sturluson probably mean nothing to most of you, and though it saddens me, I'm coming to accept that.
I suppose it doesn't matter in the end, though. The work is out there. The message, even if it has been shouted into the void, never to see reciprocation nor consideration, has been presented.
But that's just life, huh? What a bitch.