Fb-fb:
I think you're right - of all that came before, Arthur seemed to inherit al the best AND worst of his illustrious ancestors. I'll say more below, but I am really pleased that was your reading of the scene.
But I thank you and have always appreciated how you look to the larger picture of the realm and Empire. As mentioned, we'll see a little of what happens after (at least until the end of the CK era) but I really wished I could have pushed forward to the EU time frame. Sadly, my early version of the game would not port over.
To all - I have two different things to say here, both very personal. Part the one is the subject of the scene, obviously. As I began to consider how to end the work itself, months and months ago I started thinking of how to have one last dream sequence including the entire history of this full work knowing this would be the last of the Wessex saga. It wouldn't just be the end of this work but an end to the entire thing. I will say that there are five more scenes before we are done with the narrative (and they will come in the days ahead), but this would be the last of the true Wessex scenes and it was quite a challenge to pull in all of these past characters. Just trying to remember them was difficult enough, but trying to weave that into this story proved even more difficult. I actually wrote this scene before some of the previous ones you've read because I wanted to hit all of the beats between all of these characters and is likely the most difficult scene I've written within the entirety of all of this since 2016. There is/was a lot of information to impart and it's not just what happens to Arthur but relies upon the memories of you readers having read the previous stuff.
I'm not sure I captured some of the previous favorite characters as well as I desired and it was interesting to focus on some that I never focused on at all like the Confessor or Harold Godwinson. But it was fun to write and as I read your comments, I am fairly pleased that it seems like my goal was accomplished by threading the full history of Wessex into this one character at the end. It is quite true that Arthur possessed all of the best qualities of Wessex with all of the worst. That, I hope, is what makes it tragedy. I'm working on the epilogue sections as we speak after taking a healthy break from it for a time so I could come back fresh and find the right tone. I look to how to tell the rest of it and while I initially looked to the next reign and really wanted to tell it in narrative fashion, I was convinced and agree that I've pulled all the sweet nectar from this tale other than the facts. You'll read those and can see how the game ends, but this will be the last of the characters involved in which you can see and read their inner thoughts and those that lived around him and them.
The other thing I wish to say is that posting this scene on Sunday was rather bittersweet. The death of Arthur was emotional for me having spent the last year creating his character and life. However, late Saturday afternoon I received word that my sister's husband was involved in a motorcycle accident and died. He was 43. I'm having trouble just writing this because it remains shocking and so very sad. Yet I don't really know how other to process the information other than writing about it. I don't wish to bring anybody down and want to continue to focus on this story as I've spent so long working on it, but I feel the need to write about it in some way. So, I'll tell you a story...
(For those into TL ; DR, look to the bottom now)
I was born on March 18, 1973. My older sister was born 4 and a half years earlier on October 17 of 1968. Our parents were high school sweethearts, though neither of their parents were terribly excited by their pairing. I was and have been very lucky that all four of these grandparents lived into their 90's and I was mostly close to my mother's mother that I called Nana. She was a second mother to me because when I was four, my parents divorced. I won't go into details of why they did so, but suffice to say it was needed as they no longer got along. I will say that my father cheated on my mother and also that my mother has a tendency to spend beyond her means and my father is quite frugal. In the end, however, the divorce was needed. I see that now, but then I did not understand being so young. The person that helped me the most other than my grandmother Nana was my sister. And she was only 8/9 years old. We both have since had a very complicated relationship with our parents because it can be said that the divorce was not amicable. My mother remarried to a very nice man (who himself died of Leukemia in 1998 at 47 - mine own age at the now) and my father remarried to one of the women he was sleeping with who I liked quite a lot (and was an excellent cook - apropos of nothing, but I liked her and she had a son my age that was a great friend when I was young.)
So there was a new reality and not truly understanding everything, I became very close to my older sister. She took me under her wing even with doing the things elder siblings might do - "Go get me my socks" or "Hey...lets play a game...the carpet is lava and I'm the Princess so I need to ride your back to get to the couch or chair, etc." That last was a game that happened often and I was happy to play. I became the lava camel at 6 or 7 years old and even though I have back problems to this day, I would not trade those memories for the world. I depended on her and she protected me. My mom was moving into her new marriage and eventually had two more children, both daughters that I love and consider full and true sisters in every sense. I just visited my younger sister in Austin and had a wonderful time. I love each one of my three sisters with all of my heart, but the one that I hold the most affection for is my older sister. We went through the trenches together and somehow came out the other side. And I credit her for that for myself.
My older sister Tracy would get married to her own college boyfriend in 1990 and it was a wonderful wedding (in which I got quite soused after singing at her wedding.) Yet that marriage would not last long. I don't wish to go into details here either, but let us say that he (the husband) had some issues with alcoholism (which she did too) and perhaps even then his sexuality. What can be said is that they were divorced themselves within some few years and Tracy went off on an adventure. I still know her ex-husband though I have few interactions with him, but he was and is a good guy. I'm happy he has found his place within life but it was clear it was not with her and she, likewise with him. From there, my sister went searching. Tracy is bright, driven and gorgeous (though I made the mistake when she was going on a date in high school when she asked me how she looked and I said, "You look fine." For those of you with women in your life...I have learned...never tell a woman she looks "fine." Find a better descriptor!)
Anyway, after her divorce, my sister moved to Chicago for a job and when I was getting close to graduating from college myself, I wanted to move there. I didn't want to go to New York or LA for acting work. I'd been to Chicago myself and liked the people there more than NY and so we agreed that I'd move in with her. Mom and Dad weren't real happy with it, but she and I both held the attitude that they had done their thing and we were going to do ours. While we didn't get along with them, they did teach us independence well. And so I moved to Chicago. Yet Tracy was still on her journey as I was on mine. Within a month of moving there, she decided she'd had enough of Chicago (it is indeed cold most of the year and fairly dreary weather wise) and so she moved to LA herself while I stayed. Again our parents were not happy about it, but by this point Tracy wasn't talking to either of them and I was just the messenger and still on my own. I liked it and I liked it for her. She deserved whatever she could get and would get because she would indeed gain what she desired. That's how driven she was/is.
LA lasted a month for her and then she took off to France. She spent a week in Paris and then took on as an au pair in Marseilles. That lasted for about three weeks, as I remember. After that, she went to New York. She waited tables, made a life for herself and really only talked to me. There was no contact from her with our mother and father as I remained the conduit from what I heard from her as we continued to be close. It was us against the world as we had been since we were 4 and 9 years old. And by this time, our mother had found her two subsequent children, two wonderful sisters named Carly and Corinne. Carly was born in 1982 and Corinne in 1986. And then my stepfather got sick out of nowhere and within six months was dead at 47. My mother was 51 at the time.
It was 1998 and a softening to a point was found between my older sister and my mother. Having not come home or talked to her for years, Tracy did come back and was present when my stepfather was buried. She reconnected with our younger sisters and maybe starting to reconsider some of the decisions she had made. She was going to AA at the time and perhaps started to see her biological clock ticking. It was not an easy time for me either, but the less said about my decisions the better (other than I will readily admit I was a rather large pot head somehow with no money at all in Chicago still, though I was working a steady job at a law firm.) Point being, that something like my stepfather's death can make a person think and it was not long after that I decided to move back to Atlanta (where I was born and raised) and Tracy decided she wanted a child. She was pushing 30 and a woman surely thinks about such things.
Before I moved back to Atlanta in 1999, she called me and said she wanted a baby. She was willing to bring a bus boy home from the restaurant she worked at so she could get pregnant. I begged and pleaded she not do so. I guess she listened. Yet within a year, I received another call where she informed me that she was pregnant, though she was unsure of the nature of the father. He'd been involved in a knife fight outside of some bar in NY. I said be careful, but a child needs a father. I guess she listened again. My niece was born in November of 2000. She is sweet, gorgeous herself, maybe a little too needy (but I don't mind - I love hugging on her) and truly talented as she goes to art school herself in NY. And then a year later after they moved down to Miami, another girl was born. This niece was another gorgeous child and having no children myself, I have spent the last 20 years doting upon them as if they were my own because they are precious.
There was trouble in my sister's latest paring as they did not even get married until after the girls were born, but eventually they decided to do so. Not long after my 2nd niece was born, they too moved back to Atlanta and eventually joined a local church. After some time, many of the rifts within their marriage seemed to heal. I am not an organized religion kind of guy, though I am very spiritual and consider myself a Christian. Yet they two, and with their girls, committed and as of this last year were heavily involved still within that church, had started their own business in plumbing (in which my sister forced him to learn but he took to it well) that was turning out to be very successful, had seen one daughter go to college in NY and the other about to gain a scholarship in theatre to a school here in Georgia (which you might imagine I like) and had finally fallen in love. My sister likes money, no doubt. But that she can get whenever she wants. I know her. It was this other that had been found wanting. And now?
I can speak chapter and verse about how I felt about my brother in law. Yet at this time, it doesn't seem necessary. I can say that he would not have been the person I might have picked had I a choice. But I did not have that choice. It was not mine to make. What mattered was hers and this is what she found. I gained due to that choice. Two beautiful girls that I cherish as if my own. A man close to my age that I could get along with most of the time. A man of good heart, who while being a pain in the ass sometimes was giving. And most of all, a good father to two children who have now lost their father and a good husband to my sister which is all she ever deserved.
I hold a heavy heart and have since this weekend because I hate it for his parents (both still living in Texas), and I hate it for his daughters whom I love so very much that are going though something so similar to my little sisters when their father died in 1998. I hate it for all of the people that he was great at with his persona and could talk to them all - making business but pulling them in as friends (at least until he went too far, mayhaps) and I hate it...most of all...for my sister. Hate maybe is not the right word, but I don't know else how to say it. It was an accident. It happened. And now he is gone and they are where they are and there is nothing I can do about it. I can't fix that. I'm a man and pride myself (rightly or wrongly) in the idea that I can fix a problem. This one, I cannot do.
Again to the TL; DR crowd, I am sad this week. I have good friends on this forum and I hold good friends in life (one of which just lost their father at 84), but most of all, and while we may not talk much, I'm not closer to anyone as much as I am to my elder sister. And there is nothing I can do to make it right. Not for her...not the girls...not any of us.
If you've read this last portion, thank you. If not, no worries. I just needed to type out my thoughts. I can say, that much of what was suggested above has informed many of the characters I have written over the years (maybe not entirely in this work, but certainly in others.) I value this forum, and you readers, because we are a close knit family in many ways and in past circumstances you have been a help for so many when times were not quite great and so I hope that you will forgive me for writing a little mini-AAR above as I work out my thougths and feelings as to what just happened.
In short, for all of the many things within my life that I look back upon and consider hardship, they sort of pale in comparison today. Maybe always and forever. Who knows? All I know is that I was happy to complete this work, such as it is, and that I am truly grateful to all of those that had followed, read, commented and supported what I've tried to do here (and always.) My favorite quote is attributed to Jackie Robinson, "A life is not important other than the impact it makes on other lives." It may be apocryphal and misquoted, but even still...I think that it is true.
He confessed, though briefly, but still thought he might do more. For good or for ill, he still thought at the end that he could win.
Indeed it does.
So tell me how you really feel?
I think you're right - of all that came before, Arthur seemed to inherit al the best AND worst of his illustrious ancestors. I'll say more below, but I am really pleased that was your reading of the scene.
He saw it and even accepted it, to a point. But even then, could not help but still find his own sense of poor things done against him and remained insistent that he did what he did for right reasons. He did accomplish a lot. But it came at a truly great cost and this is what has haunted him.
Well, you could have said that two days ago.
But I thank you and have always appreciated how you look to the larger picture of the realm and Empire. As mentioned, we'll see a little of what happens after (at least until the end of the CK era) but I really wished I could have pushed forward to the EU time frame. Sadly, my early version of the game would not port over.
To all - I have two different things to say here, both very personal. Part the one is the subject of the scene, obviously. As I began to consider how to end the work itself, months and months ago I started thinking of how to have one last dream sequence including the entire history of this full work knowing this would be the last of the Wessex saga. It wouldn't just be the end of this work but an end to the entire thing. I will say that there are five more scenes before we are done with the narrative (and they will come in the days ahead), but this would be the last of the true Wessex scenes and it was quite a challenge to pull in all of these past characters. Just trying to remember them was difficult enough, but trying to weave that into this story proved even more difficult. I actually wrote this scene before some of the previous ones you've read because I wanted to hit all of the beats between all of these characters and is likely the most difficult scene I've written within the entirety of all of this since 2016. There is/was a lot of information to impart and it's not just what happens to Arthur but relies upon the memories of you readers having read the previous stuff.
I'm not sure I captured some of the previous favorite characters as well as I desired and it was interesting to focus on some that I never focused on at all like the Confessor or Harold Godwinson. But it was fun to write and as I read your comments, I am fairly pleased that it seems like my goal was accomplished by threading the full history of Wessex into this one character at the end. It is quite true that Arthur possessed all of the best qualities of Wessex with all of the worst. That, I hope, is what makes it tragedy. I'm working on the epilogue sections as we speak after taking a healthy break from it for a time so I could come back fresh and find the right tone. I look to how to tell the rest of it and while I initially looked to the next reign and really wanted to tell it in narrative fashion, I was convinced and agree that I've pulled all the sweet nectar from this tale other than the facts. You'll read those and can see how the game ends, but this will be the last of the characters involved in which you can see and read their inner thoughts and those that lived around him and them.
The other thing I wish to say is that posting this scene on Sunday was rather bittersweet. The death of Arthur was emotional for me having spent the last year creating his character and life. However, late Saturday afternoon I received word that my sister's husband was involved in a motorcycle accident and died. He was 43. I'm having trouble just writing this because it remains shocking and so very sad. Yet I don't really know how other to process the information other than writing about it. I don't wish to bring anybody down and want to continue to focus on this story as I've spent so long working on it, but I feel the need to write about it in some way. So, I'll tell you a story...
(For those into TL ; DR, look to the bottom now)
I was born on March 18, 1973. My older sister was born 4 and a half years earlier on October 17 of 1968. Our parents were high school sweethearts, though neither of their parents were terribly excited by their pairing. I was and have been very lucky that all four of these grandparents lived into their 90's and I was mostly close to my mother's mother that I called Nana. She was a second mother to me because when I was four, my parents divorced. I won't go into details of why they did so, but suffice to say it was needed as they no longer got along. I will say that my father cheated on my mother and also that my mother has a tendency to spend beyond her means and my father is quite frugal. In the end, however, the divorce was needed. I see that now, but then I did not understand being so young. The person that helped me the most other than my grandmother Nana was my sister. And she was only 8/9 years old. We both have since had a very complicated relationship with our parents because it can be said that the divorce was not amicable. My mother remarried to a very nice man (who himself died of Leukemia in 1998 at 47 - mine own age at the now) and my father remarried to one of the women he was sleeping with who I liked quite a lot (and was an excellent cook - apropos of nothing, but I liked her and she had a son my age that was a great friend when I was young.)
So there was a new reality and not truly understanding everything, I became very close to my older sister. She took me under her wing even with doing the things elder siblings might do - "Go get me my socks" or "Hey...lets play a game...the carpet is lava and I'm the Princess so I need to ride your back to get to the couch or chair, etc." That last was a game that happened often and I was happy to play. I became the lava camel at 6 or 7 years old and even though I have back problems to this day, I would not trade those memories for the world. I depended on her and she protected me. My mom was moving into her new marriage and eventually had two more children, both daughters that I love and consider full and true sisters in every sense. I just visited my younger sister in Austin and had a wonderful time. I love each one of my three sisters with all of my heart, but the one that I hold the most affection for is my older sister. We went through the trenches together and somehow came out the other side. And I credit her for that for myself.
My older sister Tracy would get married to her own college boyfriend in 1990 and it was a wonderful wedding (in which I got quite soused after singing at her wedding.) Yet that marriage would not last long. I don't wish to go into details here either, but let us say that he (the husband) had some issues with alcoholism (which she did too) and perhaps even then his sexuality. What can be said is that they were divorced themselves within some few years and Tracy went off on an adventure. I still know her ex-husband though I have few interactions with him, but he was and is a good guy. I'm happy he has found his place within life but it was clear it was not with her and she, likewise with him. From there, my sister went searching. Tracy is bright, driven and gorgeous (though I made the mistake when she was going on a date in high school when she asked me how she looked and I said, "You look fine." For those of you with women in your life...I have learned...never tell a woman she looks "fine." Find a better descriptor!)
Anyway, after her divorce, my sister moved to Chicago for a job and when I was getting close to graduating from college myself, I wanted to move there. I didn't want to go to New York or LA for acting work. I'd been to Chicago myself and liked the people there more than NY and so we agreed that I'd move in with her. Mom and Dad weren't real happy with it, but she and I both held the attitude that they had done their thing and we were going to do ours. While we didn't get along with them, they did teach us independence well. And so I moved to Chicago. Yet Tracy was still on her journey as I was on mine. Within a month of moving there, she decided she'd had enough of Chicago (it is indeed cold most of the year and fairly dreary weather wise) and so she moved to LA herself while I stayed. Again our parents were not happy about it, but by this point Tracy wasn't talking to either of them and I was just the messenger and still on my own. I liked it and I liked it for her. She deserved whatever she could get and would get because she would indeed gain what she desired. That's how driven she was/is.
LA lasted a month for her and then she took off to France. She spent a week in Paris and then took on as an au pair in Marseilles. That lasted for about three weeks, as I remember. After that, she went to New York. She waited tables, made a life for herself and really only talked to me. There was no contact from her with our mother and father as I remained the conduit from what I heard from her as we continued to be close. It was us against the world as we had been since we were 4 and 9 years old. And by this time, our mother had found her two subsequent children, two wonderful sisters named Carly and Corinne. Carly was born in 1982 and Corinne in 1986. And then my stepfather got sick out of nowhere and within six months was dead at 47. My mother was 51 at the time.
It was 1998 and a softening to a point was found between my older sister and my mother. Having not come home or talked to her for years, Tracy did come back and was present when my stepfather was buried. She reconnected with our younger sisters and maybe starting to reconsider some of the decisions she had made. She was going to AA at the time and perhaps started to see her biological clock ticking. It was not an easy time for me either, but the less said about my decisions the better (other than I will readily admit I was a rather large pot head somehow with no money at all in Chicago still, though I was working a steady job at a law firm.) Point being, that something like my stepfather's death can make a person think and it was not long after that I decided to move back to Atlanta (where I was born and raised) and Tracy decided she wanted a child. She was pushing 30 and a woman surely thinks about such things.
Before I moved back to Atlanta in 1999, she called me and said she wanted a baby. She was willing to bring a bus boy home from the restaurant she worked at so she could get pregnant. I begged and pleaded she not do so. I guess she listened. Yet within a year, I received another call where she informed me that she was pregnant, though she was unsure of the nature of the father. He'd been involved in a knife fight outside of some bar in NY. I said be careful, but a child needs a father. I guess she listened again. My niece was born in November of 2000. She is sweet, gorgeous herself, maybe a little too needy (but I don't mind - I love hugging on her) and truly talented as she goes to art school herself in NY. And then a year later after they moved down to Miami, another girl was born. This niece was another gorgeous child and having no children myself, I have spent the last 20 years doting upon them as if they were my own because they are precious.
There was trouble in my sister's latest paring as they did not even get married until after the girls were born, but eventually they decided to do so. Not long after my 2nd niece was born, they too moved back to Atlanta and eventually joined a local church. After some time, many of the rifts within their marriage seemed to heal. I am not an organized religion kind of guy, though I am very spiritual and consider myself a Christian. Yet they two, and with their girls, committed and as of this last year were heavily involved still within that church, had started their own business in plumbing (in which my sister forced him to learn but he took to it well) that was turning out to be very successful, had seen one daughter go to college in NY and the other about to gain a scholarship in theatre to a school here in Georgia (which you might imagine I like) and had finally fallen in love. My sister likes money, no doubt. But that she can get whenever she wants. I know her. It was this other that had been found wanting. And now?
I can speak chapter and verse about how I felt about my brother in law. Yet at this time, it doesn't seem necessary. I can say that he would not have been the person I might have picked had I a choice. But I did not have that choice. It was not mine to make. What mattered was hers and this is what she found. I gained due to that choice. Two beautiful girls that I cherish as if my own. A man close to my age that I could get along with most of the time. A man of good heart, who while being a pain in the ass sometimes was giving. And most of all, a good father to two children who have now lost their father and a good husband to my sister which is all she ever deserved.
I hold a heavy heart and have since this weekend because I hate it for his parents (both still living in Texas), and I hate it for his daughters whom I love so very much that are going though something so similar to my little sisters when their father died in 1998. I hate it for all of the people that he was great at with his persona and could talk to them all - making business but pulling them in as friends (at least until he went too far, mayhaps) and I hate it...most of all...for my sister. Hate maybe is not the right word, but I don't know else how to say it. It was an accident. It happened. And now he is gone and they are where they are and there is nothing I can do about it. I can't fix that. I'm a man and pride myself (rightly or wrongly) in the idea that I can fix a problem. This one, I cannot do.
Again to the TL; DR crowd, I am sad this week. I have good friends on this forum and I hold good friends in life (one of which just lost their father at 84), but most of all, and while we may not talk much, I'm not closer to anyone as much as I am to my elder sister. And there is nothing I can do to make it right. Not for her...not the girls...not any of us.
If you've read this last portion, thank you. If not, no worries. I just needed to type out my thoughts. I can say, that much of what was suggested above has informed many of the characters I have written over the years (maybe not entirely in this work, but certainly in others.) I value this forum, and you readers, because we are a close knit family in many ways and in past circumstances you have been a help for so many when times were not quite great and so I hope that you will forgive me for writing a little mini-AAR above as I work out my thougths and feelings as to what just happened.
In short, for all of the many things within my life that I look back upon and consider hardship, they sort of pale in comparison today. Maybe always and forever. Who knows? All I know is that I was happy to complete this work, such as it is, and that I am truly grateful to all of those that had followed, read, commented and supported what I've tried to do here (and always.) My favorite quote is attributed to Jackie Robinson, "A life is not important other than the impact it makes on other lives." It may be apocryphal and misquoted, but even still...I think that it is true.
