Max Brandt is the main character in my work-in-progress, ‘BETWIXT - where the dead things go’. Max dies in the first chapter, subtitled ‘Station’ – (dropping dead on page 4 to be exact) – and suddenly being dead and feeling wonderful, he finds himself in Betwixt. Betwixt is the razor thin edge that is the dividing plane between life and death, between existence and oblivion, between the physical world and nothing. It is where everything goes when it dies, be it people, animals, or even old buildings. A certain type of reader would look at Betwixt as the world’s garbage bin, but the souls who live there see it as a world of endless recycling.
To Max’s delight he finds Betwixt is also where dead motorcycles go and he takes the opportunity to cobble together a bobber and resume his lifelong pursuit of riding the road as an outlaw biker; something the courts, prison, parole, and the illness that killed him kept him from.
In his adventures, Max meets extraordinary people such as Werner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and a homosexual humanist philosopher who was murdered in Florence during the bonfire of the vanities, named Lorenzo who helps him see what truly is important in life. Well, death actually.
One of the ordinary people Max meets is a girl named Olive who died of a heroin overdose at the Monterey Pop Festival to the sounds of Grace Slick singing ‘White Rabbit’. In Betwixt, Olive runs ‘Olive’s Coffeeteria’ and serves coffee, tea, and fresh baked pies. Max discovers that Olive always smells and tastes of whatever pie she’d baked that day.
Olive was originally created to be a diversion for Max - a damsel in distress needing rescuing, someone kind and sweet and wonderfully fragrant to help him ease into his new existence in Betwixt. But Olive took on a personality all to herself, and Max noticed. My plan was for Max to eventually meet and fall in love with a biker chick who everyone calls Chloe, but who really is Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. Yeah, that Cleopatra.
It was going to be glorious; the story leading to the climax of a great battle between good and evil in the land of the dead, with Max and Cleopatra leading the charge for the good guys. But Max is a consummate rebel – I designed him that way – and little did I know he’d rebel against me.
Max fell in love with Olive as her full personality emerged. He didn’t know it at first, and when it starts creeping in around him he runs from it, putting as many miles between him and Olive as he possibly can. He does meet Cleopatra and they do have an affair, but he is drawn back to Olive - his true ‘tribe’ as Lorenzo tells him.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. The lifelong love Denny held for Carrie in the Gangster series was planned from the start, but Jackson falling in love with Angel who surpassed him as the driving force in That Dog Don’t Bark surprised me. Max and Olive make it the second time that characters rebelled and fell in love and it’s a habit I want to break.
So in my next novel, titled Wonderland, my plan is for my male MC to be deeply in love with a girl he calls Rabbit, because the tale begins with him finding her body in an alley and not being able to remember her name.
A D McClelland, Penticton, BC 2020
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