Afterword
Well, after nine years off and on of putting wordage into Midori, my trusty Chromebook, I finally succeeded in putting to bed the Liaison and by extension, the tetralogy of fan fiction pieces based on Kosuke Fujishima-sensei's classic manga, Oh, My Goddess.
With the completion of this afterword, my fan fiction writing days are done. My next writing project, I'm not sure what it's going to be. I want to start doing a piece of original fiction with characters of my own creation. I've thought about space thrillers, urban fantasy, the life of Navy cooks on a ship, (A life I'm quite familiar with, BTW).
I don't want to have to do a lot of research, I just want to sit down at my computer and start cranking out wordage as the Writing Muse sees fit. Other than checking facts out in the OMG manga books in my possession, all the stuff in my pieces came straight off the top of my head. I took no notes, didn't plan the plot out in advance. I don't write to a page quota, schedule, or a deadline. I write as the spirit moves me. I may put a piece away for months, then pick it up again and crank out three and four chapters in as many days.
Not exactly the most professional way to write a book, but it works for me. The Writing Muse is an imaginary character that I believe gives me the inspiration to write these pieces. I imagine her as an attractive ethereal woman who appears in my mind and depending on how she feels, she influences how much and how well I write. The Muse is helpful, but she can be a fickle mistress. Some days, she'll be generous and give me seven or eight pages of good quality material, some days only two or three. Somedays, she justs stands there with her arms across her chest, shaking her head and saying, "No dice today, kid. You're on your own. Got nothing for ya!"
Writing the tetralogy of these pieces was a lot of fun. It was a pretty good amount of work. I spent a lot of hours in libraries, Starbucks, at home, or wherever there was a comfy seat, a table and Wi-Fi. Of the four pieces, the Liaison was the largest, and took the longest time to write, over six years. Not including the Afterword, it was 244 pages and about 115,000 words. It was the most complex of the stories. It represents the culmination of a steady progression of complexity in the stories that I started back in 2009. Each story in the series was larger and more complex than the last.
"Song of the Goddesses" was a mere 71 pages and had a single plot. It concentrated on Keiichi and Belldandy with Urd, Skuld, Lind, Megumi, Hasegawa, Chihiro, Tamiya and Ootaki and Peorth playing relatively minor roles.
"Test of a God." introduced Marller and Hild. And it was still a single plot story checking in at 94 pages and just short of 50,000 words. Test also started the various connections and arcs that would continue through "Eye of Heaven" and "The Liaison" "Test" also added the first original character (Frigga)
"Test" also introduced the role of Gods into the story. As those who have read Oh My Goddess know, there isn't a lot of content involving Gods in the manga. So I had to proceed with the assumption that Gods are treated no differently than Goddesses. They are subject to the same rules regarding licenses, magical ability, and so on as Goddesses except that Gods cannot hold a field license that allows them to contract with humans, and First Class Gods are exempt from the prohibition of telling lies. THESE TWO PARTS ARE NOT PART OF OMG CANON! THEY ARE OF MY OWN CREATION. SO DON'T COMPLAIN TO ME WHEN YOU SEE THAT IN THE STORY.
Eye of Heaven was the first story that ran with multiple plots and added more characters of my own creation (Ragnar, Baldur, Agneta and Anni-Frid and the Eye) in addition to Chrono, Ere and Ex, and Sayoko and Aoshima. It was also the first story that was heavily based in Heaven. It was 130 pages and 67,000 words.
Liaison introduced a few more original characters (Ilse, Talgard, Arvid, Istvar, Torvald, Rev. Kasunori) and answered a bunch of questions and tied up a few loose ends, for example, the origin of the Song of the Goddesses, and why it was able to turn Keiichi into a God, among other things. It was easily the most complex story in the collection. Maybe it was a little too complex. There are definitely questions that I did not answer, and probably should not have added in the first place. It also debuted Kami-sama as a major character. It checked in at a hefty 244 pages and 119,000 words.
If you notice, there were a few interesting tidbits about the pieces. One, notice that I never had anyone die in the main stories. Only in the epilogue did I mention when the various human characters passed. That was because Oh, My Goddess was primarily a positive manga that did not explore the possibility of its characters dying, and I didn't want to introduce that element in my stories. I wanted to keep the stories as positive as possible. In the epilogue, I had Keima and Chihiro die suddenly, and Hasegawa turn up missing under unusual circumstances. The rest of the human cast all died under natural causes.
Another tidbit. If you read the epilogue, you'll notice that I dated it in October 2088. The reason I chose 2088 was, One, Fujishima-sensei started the manga in 1988, and I wanted to pay a bit of homage to that year by closing out the series a thousand years into the future.
Notice that I put Keiichi and Belldandy's end story last. That was simple. They were the major characters in the manga, I was just making sure to save the best for last.
In "Test", I started the story with a steamy first chapter. Keiichi and Belldandy had just finished making love. I didn't want to refer to their romantic activities as having sex. I wanted to make sure that Keiichi and Belldandy's love remained as pure as possible. At the same time, I wanted to move their relationship to a more adult level. One of the biggest gripes readers had with Oh, My Goddess was the glacially slow pace in which Bell and Kei's relationship progressed. The manga ran for 26 years and the most affection Kei and Bell shared was the occasional kiss and holding of hands. Fujishima clearly wanted to show that a man and a woman could have a loving relationship without both of them falling into bed. But I wanted to move the relationship along a bit. And I used the occasion of Keiichi becoming a God to mark the point at which the relationship entered a new phase.
To me, there is a difference between making love and having sex. You don't necessarily have to care about someone or commit to them to have sex with them. But to me, making love to someone means that you have some semblance of love or commitment to them. Keiichi and Belldandy definitely did have sex, but there was love and caring and commitment involved. If Keiichi and Hild or Keiichi and Urd would have gotten together, I would have referred to it has having sex. Because Hild and Urd are very much sexual creatures who would get naked in a heartbeat. Belldandy, however, not so much. I wanted to show respect for Fujishima's characters, by having them engage in an adult relationship without dragging them through the mud of hentai or erotica. That would constitute portraying his characters radically out of character, which is a major no-no in writing fan fiction, which already gets a bad rap in literary circles.
Final tidbit. Notice that I gave Hild a little more of a mean streak in the pieces than she had in the manga. The manga's version of Hild was more like a frenemy or a friendly rival. She wanted to get rid of the Goddesses, but she also asked for their help when Hagal took over Hild's throne. And she and Marller were witnesses and Keiichi and Belldandy's wedding in Volume 48.
My version of Hild had a little bite to her. She attacked the temple in "Test" and hit Belldandy with a spell that critically injured her, and almost killed her. She used Baldur's position to get Keiichi to sit for the First Class Exam and how she weaseled her way into becoming the proctor for his first challenge. In "Eye" She struck an alliance with Baldur, and then kicked him out of Niflheim, when she couldn't handle anymore of his plan to secure the Eye of Heaven and she then left him holding the bag double crossing him when she allowed the disc containing their treasonous conversation to find its way to Heaven where it unleashed a virus that almost brought down Yggdrasil.
In "Liaison" there's the story account of how Hild brutally trained her demons as well as how she seduced them. How she strung Torvald along through his training by bedding him and having sex with him only to deflate his ego by telling him that she did not love him. How Hild used Ilse as a mole to eavesdrop on Kami-sama. How she recruited three deities to get Kami-sama's assistant Talgard to work for him and forge his God symbol to sign an order to distract Bell, Urd and Skuld into going to Heaven and leaving Keiichi alone to defend the outpost from Torvald's attack. And how she double crossed the three strangers by slipping an anonymous message to Kami-sama, causing him to send them to the Void. How she seduced Torvald in his room and in her throne room when she wanted him to attack the outpost and kill Keiichi. But also Hild showed a bit of compassion when she appeared to exorcise the spirit of Torvald from Skuld's mind and crushed it. I gave Hild a more complex and nastier upgrade to her personality.
I only wish that I could have cleaned up a few loose ends before I put the Liaison to bed. One was the whole conversation between Keiichi and Arvid regarding Kei's ring and how he could remove it. I never expanded on the Mark that Arvid bestowed on Keiichi and why had to leave the Earth never to return once it turned red. The Mark never made an appearance again until the epilogue. What was that mark for, why did Arvid give it to Keiichi in exchange for the information Kei needed? I never explained why Belldandy had to take the ring to Heaven to have Arvid's spirit placed into it in the first place. There were a lot of plot holes in that section of the piece, and I wish I could have figured out a better way to get through it. I'm surprised that the readers of the Liaison on didn't spot that big plot hole and challenge me on it. I'm surprised that I didn't get much criticism at all about the four pieces. Most of the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. I'm sure that if I had a professional editor read my pieces, I'd be swimming in corrections.
There's a bunch more insights and observations that I could go through, but I'm ready to close out this afterword. But one final thing. I'm a man. And I wrote what is basically a love story. That is unusual. Most male writers write thrillers where stuff gets blown up, or spy novels filled with intrigue and cloak and dagger. Or police and military heroes battle terrorists and bad guys. They don't usually write love stories. Any romantic angles that appear in books most men write is strictly secondary to the action and explosives.
There's a bit of action in my pieces. But it is secondary to the story of a klutzy human who encounters a Goddess and the evolution of that relationship from the granting of a wish to friendship, to love, to marriage, to an eternal bond. Maybe I'm getting in touch with my inner female. Maybe I'm a man with a chick-lit author inside screaming to get out. But I have no regrets about how the pieces turned out. I think they turned out okay, with some regrets.
But my rule applies. Once I put a story to bed, I don't wake it up again. So the Song of the Goddesses, Test of a God, The Eye of Heaven and the Liaison will rest quietly, warts and all. I'll read them occasionally. But they will not be edited anymore. They are in, what I call frozen storage.
My fan fiction career is complete. The next piece I write, whatever the fiction genre may be, will be an original. But I will take seriously the lessons I learned in this tetralogy and apply them to whatever the next project will be and I hope that the Writing Muse is willing to take the next journey with me.
I'd like to thank the the Creative Writing and Communications Skills staffs at Community College of Allegheny County and Robert Morris University for helping introduce me to the Writing Muse. I'd like to also thank the readers of my pieces at .net for their reviews and encouragement. Also Acer Computers for making Midori, my trusty Chromebook, and last, but certainly not least, Kosuke Fujishima-sensei, for allowing us fanfic writers to take his characters to new and different places and unexplored heights.
Pierre R. Wheaton
Pittsburgh, PA
August, 2018