I want to express my deepest gratitude for the response to Fidèle, both the ratings and the endlessly thoughtful feedback. I've tried to write back to all of you and will continue to do so.
What follows will include spoilers for the story, so if you haven't read it all the way through (and intend to) you should stop now.
Many readers found the ending moving and most found it devastating. That was intentional. As hard as it was for some to read, it was even harder for the author to write. I'd lived a very intense internal emotional life with these characters for about a year and a half, after all. Doing that to them was as heartbreaking as it was necessary.
But it wasn't the original ending. The first outline had Luke and Kathryn living out their lives in the bliss of true love and sexual adventure. Except that after I started writing and realized that, because I wanted my characters to be well-meaning but, to one extent or another, flawed, I couldn't proceed to such a facile ending without great care.
The ending then became Kathryn's letter to Luke, just after Bill's funeral. But that was too much the other extreme; everyone was either miserable or dead.
Ultimately, it was my lingering indecision over just what sort of ending I wanted that led me to the ending I actually wrote: first the illusory triumph, then the relentless downward spiral, and finally the poignant, melancholy, tragic, and ultimately ambiguous "inconclusion."
Luke and Kathryn both brought flaws to the relationship, but the most deformative flaws were a result of the relationship. Kathryn arrived with a history of trauma and a need for emotional control that she wouldn't fully understand until long after it was too late. Luke entered with swaggering self-confidence in everything but actual love, met unattainable perfection, and blindly dove into an ocean he never believed he could successfully traverse, losing himself along the way. They were a couple that were meant to be together yet proved themselves incapable of being together.
Since many have asked: this is all I'll ever tell of Luke's story. Everyone is free to imagine their own continuation, if they wish. Does Luke fall back into his quicksand of misery and regret? Does he redefine his life and try to make a new life with Rose? Does he patch things up with Wendy? Or is his future something completely different? I don't know, and I actually mean that: I got about a half-page into an outline for each of the two "main" branches and decided I'd rather not know what happened. The story's better for it.
This, of course, means that I can't really write more about Rose either, which is something I deeply regret as I adore the character. In the future I may (or may not) write a few "in-universe" stories about some of the supporting characters, both from the "real" world and from Luke's dream. (For example, I'd dearly love to write about Maddie.)
But after insisting to a whole bunch of correspondents that I couldn't write about Rose because anything involving her future would provide hints about Luke's future, inspiration struck and I've written a very brief story involving Rose that does no such thing. I don't know if it's canonical or not; I'd call it more of an entertaining Easter egg for people who made it to the end of Fidèle. Readers who've (correctly) observed that I seem to particularly enjoy writing dialogue won't be surprised to learn that it's a story told almost entirely via dialogue. I'll post it sometime over the next week or so.
Some have also asked for a list of the wine and food featured in Fidèle. I actually kept running lists of both just so I didn't repeat myself (unless I needed to for story purposes), so once I get those cleaned up I'll post them as blogs. I've consumed all the wines and cooked all the dishes featured in the story, and thus everything's recommended (unless I specifically suggest otherwise).
As for what's next, I have a medium-length work of speculative fiction for which I've lost some enthusiasm, so it's taking a bit of a break at chapter 4 while I rethink some things. I've got a one- or two-chapter story about a very, very popular trope in both filmic and written erotica that, like Fidèle, exists both as a narrative and as a commentary on the narrative. And I've got two rather lunatic outlines...one barreling out of the darkness into something much lighter and the other relentlessly, punishingly dark. The trope-commentary should see the light of day early this summer, though (as has been the case for many others) quarantine has sapped my creative energies. The others...no idea. I'd like to get two more out by the end of the year, but I also intend to prep Fidèle for the commercial market (don't worry, it's not going to leave SOL) and that might take priority for a while.
Thanks again, so very, very much, to those who enjoyed, or at least appreciated, the work.