It’s up! “Sons and Daughters,” Chapter 3 of Barry Anderson: An Unexpected Fairy Tale, is live and you can read it here! Or go here to start at 1 – Birthday. (There is also 2 – Lessons but I’m assuming you know how numerical sequentialism works.)
3 – Sons and DaughtersI think quoting my favorite lines would in most cases be either spoilers or punch lines (or my slightly more scandalous phrases like “plug becoming an outlet”). But to share, some of my favorite moments in this chapter involve Nick playing video games on the internet (😱), Dania and the “real” stories of Snow White and Cinderella, along with why fairy godmother spells have time limits whereas color magic doesn’t, and Grape’s experiences with vintage dresses and spoons, the physics of teleportation magic and weebs, alien plush toys and the Mionn a Draíocht, Lassie and hair ties. There’s also lots of sons and daughters and the roles they play.
I’m just going to stop telling you guys how long chapters are, so you don’t get scared away…
Nah, who am I kidding? It’s 41,232 words and I love every stinkin’ one of them. Yes, that’s two-thirds of a respectable novel length, in one chapter. Yes, that means that chapters 1-3 together make 82,666 words and they say 100,000 words is entering “epic novel” length and you sure as inclement weather better have something important to say if you’re going to go off that long.
And Barry is 30 chapters long. Before the sequels. And I’m not going to promise this will be the longest chapter. It most likely won’t be, knowing what’s ahead.
But every line is important to the picture being painted. Believe it or not, with my casual tone and overuse of words like “really” and “stuff,” every phrase and interaction is very intentional. The way someone moves their eyebrows or when they choose to interrupt says volumes about their internal turmoil, whether they realize it or not. And Barry has a lot of internal turmoil.
Despite the barrier that length might be for some readers, Chapter 3 is my favorite to this point and I hope it really shows the audience where we’re going, overall. Two points make a line, but you need three points to make a trajectory, to see whether it’s going to be a straight line or not. Chapter 3 completes the first small plot arc of the story and finishes establishing the themes and where you can expect this very long story to go. It has a lot of establishing to finish, before Chapter 4 is off like a rocket into the plot moving forward.
Each chapter is more like a mini era, that turns the plot and character development in its own unique way. Each has its own attitudes, themes, and events that couldn’t happen in any other chapter because none of the characters are in the same place from chapter to chapter.
To quote Stephen Schwartz, as quoted in 2 – Lessons, which is in turn a paraphrasing of Heraclitus, “You can’t step in the same river twice, the water’s always changing, always flowing.” I only have 30 chapters over the course of a single year to change this boy’s life, and each one of them needs to do something different. If anything, I’m rather stunned that 1/10th of the chapters are live now, and mildly sad to never have those three mini eras to write in again, at least from Barry’s point of view.
All that being said, I really hope to get a move on and not post only one chapter a year. I have other novels to write too, and I can’t wait 27 more years for this one to have its full effect. Although it’s not like I’ve only been writing chapters 1-3 the past few years by a long shot. Chapters 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, and 18 are all already longer than Chapter 1 (which was 12,700 words), and there are no chapters with under 500 words written (the climax chapter having the least written prose atm).
But Chapter 3 is very dear to me. It’s okay if you maybe don’t know what to think at this point, or for a while in this chapter; neither does Barry. He’s feeling torn every which way and if adults disagree so thoroughly on these topics–things like gender and attraction, fate and destiny, responsibility and trust, fairness and defining yourself–then how is a sixteen-year-old (usually) boy supposed to figure it out?
It’s okay to not be able to tell where I, as an author, stand on these things. 😉 Like Barry’s finding out, the universe has a physics to it, but none of it is simple.
Eh, or just take it as a fairy story. Like Puck says in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…
To quote Barry in the chapter in question, “Mom, maybe stop trying to make sense of the supposed decisions of a trippy dreamland dimension. I’m not sure logic and rationality are at work here.”
If you don’t want to yield to themes that offend, feel free to treat my very long writing like a fever dream with a lot of cleavage. That’s certainly what Barry would prefer to do.
Along with the chapter, here are some other Barry features that have been updated, so you know where to find them:
Chapter Quotes
Chapter 3 is the first to go live with its chapter heading quotes, but now these are a staple of all the chapters, and I’ve gone back and put the ones at the beginning of 1 – Birthday and 2 – Lessons. I have these selected for every chapter through the end of the story and I love how they illustrate and encapsulate each mini-era.
Each chapter has an actual, historically-written quote, written by an author with a national and cultural background that’s relevant to fairy lore, such as Greek, Irish, French, or German, and Barry-relevant specialties, such as philosophers, scientists, or fairy tale writers.
Each chapter also has a plot and theme-relevant song lyric quote from the soundtrack of that chapter, and I have zero pretension when it comes to the songs in this story. This leads to satisfying and amusing combinations of archaic and high-brow historical quotes, beside goofy pop and children’s song lyrics. Some of my favorite combos are Socrates and the Spice Girls, Tennyson and Taylor Swift, Aesóp and Elvis, Carl Jung and the Cars, Shakespeare and the Beatles, da Vinci and CHVRCHES, Ovid and Sofia the First, and the Norse Vǫluspá and Barbie.
But they each triangulate the themes and vibes of the chapter they head, and I hope you enjoy them from here on out.
Song posts
In that same vein, I am planning to have a post for each song in the soundtrack, bringing out its significance to the story and the themes and motifs I use it to illustrate in context. There will also be posts about the overall motifs of the story, which are a big deal for the meta of the story and symbolism I’m kinda super extra about. Very few of these posts are up yet—less than I would like—but I hope to post more of these soon.
But I don’t think everyone was aware of the ones that have been posted, so I thought I’d point them out:
The post for St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion) by John Parr discusses foreshadowing, omens of fate, and holding onto the future we planned, when we’re not genre-savvy to the serendipity in our own lives. Maybe don’t fight the foreshadowing; it’s not always as subtle as we think.
The post for Let’s Hear It For the Boy by Deniece Williams discusses both the vibes of the Barry soundtrack and my beloved use of irony in lyrics, as well as celebrating my protagonist boy and the beloved mess he is.
Those are the songs from Chapter 1, and I only have one of the three songs from Chapter 2 up.
The post about When You Can Fly Again from Fancy Nancy is an exploration into Dania’s motives as she gets overexcited and maybe a little bit silly, not understanding why her little butterfly might not want to go do pretty sparkly things with her, but how much she wants to help him fly.
Considering I finished writing the post for House of Gold by twenty one pilots last October (foolishly waiting to finish the one for Trying On Dresses by Darby, which I still haven’t finished) I’d like to post it soon. That one is about mortality, legacy, and death in fay culture and Barry feeling torn between his two worlds; it has a lot of pretty and potent prose, if I do say so myself, and I’m anxious for it to be read.
And Chapter 3 has three more songs to elaborate on, so I really hope to write up these things soon.
Chapter Icons
Silly little thing, but a while ago I wanted chapter icons for my own benefit, just simple images that symbolize each chapter, which I could use for my own menus. I’ve made seventeen so far, and now the first three are on the menu and the chapters.
Chapter Bookmarks
Despite being a mean author who expects people to read 41k words on a single web page, I do actually want chapters to be accessible and don’t actually expect people to read any chapter in one sitting, lol. So now, at the top of each chapter page, there are actually bookmarks!! Section headings would throw off the groove of the chapters, but I feel like casually naming parts of the chapter with titles that you’ll understand if you’ve read that part, but won’t spoil ahead of time, actually add to the chapters, hopefully. So now Chapters 1-3 have sections at scene or concept breaks, every 500-1500 words. They were really fun to name anyway.
And as I release audiobook versions, I can also break up the tracks at these same breaks and use the same titles. Ultimately I’d love to have a playlist of all the audiobook tracks, with the soundtrack songs intermixed where-ish they go with the prose and events, so you can just pop the playlist on and get the whole Barry Anderson experience in order.
Which, granted, will eventually take months to listen to 😅 but it’s fine. Please love me despite my super extra 🙏.
Media Glossary
Starting with the Extras for Chapter 2, I included a glossary for the non-English words used in the chapter. (This glossary is going to be crazy long for Chapter 11 and the research might kill me lol. Although my Arthurian research for Chapter 12 is a lot more extensive.) Chapter 3 has a decent amount of non-English phrases, so it has that glossary included in the Extras, but 3 – Sons and Daughters also includes a large amount of media and story references (and science-related terms) that Barry often mentions off-handedly. I want these references to be accessible to readers, even if they haven’t seen all of the media referenced. So there’s a glossary for these references on the 3 – Extras page. And, shocking to no one, I used it as an opportunity to commentate, elaborate and joke about the different media, and use them to bring out different things about the story. Hopefully they’re a fun read, even if you already get the references to FPSs, Star Trek, He-Man, Bewitched, or Fibonacci. I’m a girl of varied interests–and therefore sometimes so is Barry 😉 –and my references and jokes reflect this.
Anyway, in spite of so much preamble, I truly hope that you enjoy 3 – Sons and Daughters, and that it helps you explore complex questions about fate, trust, chaos, gender, and adulthood, with some giggles (and maybe some tears) along the way.
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