I decided to add some of my afterthoughts to my short stories (those where I HAD afterthoughts, that is). I’ve been meaning to do this some time, and finally here’s the one for “A Girl Called Marian”, which is more necessary than you’ll think because it’s a prologue to a longer story. The link to the 16-page prologue is here.

Afterthoughts
After this section, the story launches straight into Chapter 1 of N.S.E.W., the main body of the story. I believe this prologue sets the right tone for the actual body of the story, since it deals strongly with loss and regret – themes that are not only central to the main story, but also to the Classic Western. Marian may be full of regret at the end of this story, but that doesn’t mean her life would have been fantastic had she chose to wait for East to come back instead. Women in Westerns have limited choices and career paths. If Marian hadn’t hooked up with the local rich guy for at least a more luxurious and stable lifestyle, the alternative would be to wait as a milkmaid for whenever East decides to come back. She can either fulfil the romantic Western ideal of waiting for the man she loves to return, or she can be more materialistic and choose the man she doesn’t love; but has lots of money. In the end, it seems a choice between love and money, but is really a choice between idealism and realism. The world of N.S.E.W. is not a fairy-tale one.

When I consider Marian (and other women characters in N.S.E.W.), their plight is an important part of the story, something conventional Westerns never address much. Lurking beneath every bounty-huntin’, gun-totin’, frontier-exploring Western story is the fact that women were an oppressed lot in that kind of society. Their problems are usually considered in afterthought, if at all, after the smoke has cleared and heroics has been demonstrated (by the men). I guess this story was written as a rebuke to the typical romantic view of the Wild Wild West, where the good guy shoots the bad buy, saves the girl, ride off into the sunset and live happy ever after.