Afterword

There are so many avenues in this book that tracking them all was a good challenge. It did make for a hefty volume, though, didn’t it? There are many paths Garinor can take. Did you make your way to the castle? Did you visit the grassy knoll? Were you lost in Kallinoria? Did you meet the Sisters? Was Song an ally? Did you fulfill your destiny, or did you have severe consequences on your way?

If you follow the story all the way through, it’s only about 100 pages long. That’s not too bad right? The book itself is a lot bigger than that because of the possible ways you can navigate through the tale.

Choose-the-fate stories have temptations to jump around through the book and see what happens without following the scripted page numbers. It breaks the story, for sure, but it happens. You can't find this in the web version, but there is a section called Disenchanted near the middle of the book. None of Garinor’s choices will ever lead you there. If you want to read it, click here.

To give you the feel for how the book works, the first decision you make is inconsequential. The second decision you make can lead to your death. These are done on purpose to help you understand the flow of the book. From there, the story branches out depending on your choices.

There are over a dozen endings where Garinor completes his quest and nearly two dozen where he doesn’t. There is one “best” ending among them all, though there are a lot of good endings in there, too. There are two paths in the first half of his journey that Garinor can follow toward the best ending, but then it becomes a series of careful choices to finally reach it.

There are nine days in the journey and on the sixth day it rains, regardless of which path you choose. After all, this is all happening at the same time, so it shouldn’t matter which way he goes; if it’s meant to rain, it’s going to rain.

Garinor meets up with a lot of characters along the way. There is a group of five sisters whose names are all shuffled from the letters A, E, I, N, and R. There is at least one character name that starts with each letter of the alphabet, including Xagron for X and Quiver for Q. Speaking of characters, my favorite side character is Song. His interactions with Garinor are so much fun.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the journey, for me, is how I wrote it. I had a map that I sketched out as the story days passed, complete with arrows pointing to overlapping plot points. It was a true story diagram! But more than that, I wrote the entire main part of the story over the course of thirty days, all except the final best-story arc and its tie-in scenes. Thirty days! It took two more weeks to complete the rest of it. Considering this tale has over 210,000 words in it, that’s quite a feat! It’s one of my crowning achievements.