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Hi! You are no longer inside the fic. This is the writer speaking to you from beyond. Be not afraid.
I thought I’d include this final chapter as a kind of home base, a place for comments on the work as a whole instead of specific paths and to write my little afterword because this fic was a big deal for me and I don't want to cram this into a bunch of different author's notes.
I know it's silly to get all sincere about a Murphamy fic of all things, but planning and writing this over the past year and a half was the most fun I’ve ever had on a creative project, and easily the hardest I’ve ever worked on one. I’ve been writing Murphamy and fic in general for 8 years (jesus christ) and I’ve done some fun stuff but this felt nothing like that any of that. It took a humongous master outline, a cartoonish number of chapter outlines and word docs (hundreds… rocking back and forth in my straitjacket), four bubble plot maps (color-coded and everything!), several actual maps and a history book that I accidentally returned full of gay little sticky notes to the library. Since I started this story I have moved, graduated from college, started a career, quit the career, and started a new career. And the whole time my big not-quite-cowboy fic was my constant, my loyal friend and bubbling spring of joy (even while I brutally murder my characters) and I love it like my child.
Thank you to my human best friend and partner in crime, Ariel (arcadianparadigm on here, if you are a veteran Murphamy I’m sure you’re familiar with his work), for being consistently hype about whatever I’m writing even though everything takes me forever and I’m weird and secretive about it. Whenever my confidence in what I’m writing wobbles, Ariel senses it and is there to do backflips for me. Everything I write is, first and foremost, for my hilarious and supportive friends from the long-dead Murphamy twitterverse and my little writer trio (you know who you are), and it’s an extra bonus that some strangers out there might enjoy it too.
Thanks for taking a chance on this. I know it’s niche and looks insane, I’m sure the word count was very scary, but I wanted to write something different and fun for my buddies and I think it turned out pretty cool. I’m from the rural South (my friends are reading this like SHUT UP we know!) and /I/ think there’s a criminal lack of Southern gothic stories in modern media outside of horror (crime and violence, religious trauma, class tensions, marginalization, moral dilemmas, prisons and trains and swamps oh my), and when I was planning this fic in fucking December of 2021 I fully intended for this to be a campy spaghetti Western, but (and I’m about to sound crazy) the story did not want to be that. So I let it be what it wanted to be and I’m so glad I did. :)
I have been so pathetically, tail-waggingly excited to share this and talk about it and had to hold it in forever because it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t a surprise. I also told Ariel several times that I was worried I was going to be hit by a car before I got to post it. I literally thought about this every day. But the thing I was most excited about in posting this was getting to talk with people about all the little choices they made and the little paths they wove and the little endings they got (the endings are my favorite part), so for the love of God please talk with me in the comments. I’ll just be sitting around refreshing my own inbox for a few months.
Thanks a whole bunch for being here and getting silly kooky wacky with me. I hope having an afterword on a fic isn’t presumptuous, I just spent a long time on this and wanted to talk about it and didn't know how else to end a half-a-million-word meandering interactive fic. LOL
P.S. In case you're considering “replaying/rereading” this, there are 6 possible endings and 37 (?) possible storylines (only mathematically, there's not that much deviation, you can read through it twice and get two unique stories out of it before you start having to repeat things. I’m not god). So personally I would read through it twice at most and then let it sit until you forget stuff.
OKAY. Thanks for being here. Love you all, see you next time. (I hover and spin away like a maple seed).