Packsister’s Weblog

Somehow it’s always the “what happened after” that keeps me thinking, much more so than the actual story. I mean, here I go, write a story from the moment Jean Grenier sees his first werewolf until the moment André and Francoise are allowed to marry. That’s the story. What happens after it isn’t going to be in this book or any other book. But it keeps my attention tighter than the story itself.

Just think about it. André is my main character. By the end of the story he’s got a baby brother to raise in safety, every day checking for the signs of destructive insanity in him. He’s got a wife who’d been born and raised in a rich noble family but gave up everything to be with him, so she doesn’t know the first thing about keeping a household but is eager to learn everything. And he’s got something he wants to dedicate his life to. It#s a project, to write a detailed book about werewolves, a history of his own clan, then travel the world, seek out other clans and write their stories. How do you travel the world with a wife and a kid? With no money (and we’re still around 1601), only a little bit of property and a house left by the parents? Andrés married life is of more interest to me, it seems. I wonder if all writers love to know what happened AFTER the happy end by the end of their books?

“Funny how they always wanna be friends after they rip your guts out.” That’s a film quote, a man commenting on women. It has nothing to do with what I was writing above, I just had this funny touchy feeling in MY guts hearing this. I AM a woman for sure, yet how can you not be compassionate with men? For all the things men do for women – being a woman myself I don’t know if women really do the same crazy things for men. I remember my own brother commenting on a different film: “There is another man who would do ANYTHING to make his woman feel good. Just like me.” Sometimes I do wish I could understand a man’s mind, I wish I could see the world the way some men see it, maybe I wish I could see women the way men see us and understand this urge to do crazy, impossible, irrational things for us. Don’t wish to be a man, however, because if I was a man, men wouldn’t be a mystery to me. I’m only fascinated because I am a woman. I am fascinated nonetheless.