Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)

Prologue
Remember: Spoilers!

One of the major reasons Covenant and I decided to rewrite this book was because humor just ain’t selling like it used to. So, in my continuing efforts to sacrifice my artistic integrity for the sake of a few bucks, I altered much of the manuscript. The point was not to take the humor out, but to make the book appear to be a suspense novel. Wake Me When It’s Over and Tangled Web are more of what you’d consider humorous suspense – and, with humor doing poorly at the bookstores, we wanted to market it as straight suspense, and then let readers be pleasantly surprised when they discovered it was funny as well.

The beginning of the book was particularly problematic, because the first seven or eight chapters were where a lot of the funny stuff took place. So, we decided to add a prologue, to set the stage for the rest of the book. (In other words, we’d have a very suspense-novel kind of dramatic prologue, to get suspense readers interested, and then we’d go back to Eric and Rebekah dorking around and cracking jokes.) (It’s funny to note that, even after adding the prologue, a lot of those jokes in the first couple chapters got toned down anyway.)

The final prologue was the best of three that I wrote. The other two were actually historical, taking place during the October Days of the French Revolution, wherein thousands of French women stormed the Hotel De Ville, protesting the price of bread. (The implication – spoilers ahoy, again – being that the Illuminati incited the riot.) (In The Counterfeit, Eric discusses the event on page 121.)

The first prologue I wrote was from the point of view of an Englishwoman in the Hotel De Ville, watching the protest below, and scrambling for safety. It was from an outsider’s perspective, and raised the questions: If the great philosophical writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu were inciting the revolution, why was it that the illiterate poor the ones revolting? And, who was starting the rumors that led to the Great Fear – rumors that turned out to be false?

The second prologue was about the same October Days event, but took place outside the Hotel De Ville. It involved a mysterious man watching his handiwork from afar: he, a member of the Illuminati, had been instrumental in orchestrating the riot.

The final prologue, which appears in The Counterfeit, is modern day, and is all about Edward. As much as I liked the other prologues, this one definitely had the best fit.

(The reason it takes place in Japan is because Edward was working with the Japanese government. The reason it takes place in the Port of Yokohama is because Edward runs all of his operations from aboard a massive luxury yacht, The Beekeeper. The yacht played a huge role in Tangled Web, but got entirely cut from The Counterfeit.) (The reason it takes place at 5:45am is because Edward is just such a hard-working go-getter.)

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