Update Link: Mad World, Book 4.5: At Christmas

Merry Christmas Eve to those of you who celebrate, and I hope everyone is having a great last week of the year. I always try to do something special for my readers this time of the year, but sometimes my schedule doesn’t allow for it.

I’m always reminded how incredibly lucky I am to be able to have what is basically a second career writing for our small, but fiercely loyal community. So many of the same readers’ names show up every update in the replies, and I’m so insanely aware of how rare it is to still have any kind of readership for a couple that hasn’t been together since December 2008, especially as the show’s ratings continue to fall. I started writing Liason fanfiction when I was freshly out of high school in 2002, recuperating from foot surgery. And almost 22 years later, through college, graduate school, a pandemic, and my first few years as a teacher, you guys have been here, and it’s meant a lot to me to have this place to come to.

In 2017, I started a semi-annual tradition of writing epilogues for some of my favorite stories, revisiting our characters during the holidays. I don’t always manage it, and it’s been gone for a few years, but I’m back this year with a special entry.

I wrote Mad World between 2017-2022 in a series of four books. I started writing in 2017 the story that would ultimately become Book 2, but I quickly realized to tell the story the way I wanted to, I needed to go back and rewrite the panic room, so I added Book 1. And then, well, as you know, the story kept expanding and the universe kept getting bigger until I had maybe half a million words, 115 chapters, and a world that I really loved spending time in.

I always planned to return to it with a few follow short stories (I hinted at Lila’s passing, but it was never written in the book), and I started working on a Christmas story last year. But it never came together because of my schedule at my last district. This year, I took another look at it, and well, here we are.

At Christmas is still in progress! I didn’t finish writing it yet, but I’m confident in my ability to complete it, so you’re getting sort of a mini-flash fiction type series. I have it planned and plotted, and I already went back and rewrote Parts 1 & 2 in some spaces. I’m expecting to write between 36,000 to 40,000 words in about six parts, and be done posting by January 1.

You should have semi-daily updates, except for Wednesday, when I plan to do flash fiction.

Previous Holiday Epilogues

• 2017: All I Want For Christmas, Second Epilogue
• 2018: Bittersweet, Second Epilogue
• 2019: The Best Thing, Epilogue
• 2020: The Next Best Thing (absorbs The Best Thing Epilogue & expands)

NOTE: As I was linking these, I realized that the plugin I used to power my graphics broke at some point and a lot of character and banner images are broken. I’ll fix them as I come across them.

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