Happily Ever After Stories?

Don’t you love and “they lived happily ever after” stories?

Not because it’s reality, but because in our complicated cruel world, it’s lovely to drift away and enjoy a story that ends happily.

We all need a little hope, if not magic, somedays!

Knowing true love will at least be met is part of the draw of romance novellas, and certainly at Christmas time, a chance to spend an hour in a far country long ago and be simple, is appealing.

Readers have written telling me how disappointed they were the novella ended–they wanted more. What really happened to those characters?

Did they really live happily ever after?

I broached the question to my eight co-authors on A Pioneer Christmas Collection, suggesting they tell us what happened to their characters after the story ended.

Four of us wrote out responses–a Christmas catch-up, if you will, of where those character went in their lives.

Several, though, didn’t have answers.

Not because they didn’t love their characters, but because of how those characters live in their minds.

Cynthia Hickey’s story, A Christmas Castle, is upfront about marital challenges between virtual strangers: her heroine is a mail order bride. Or, in this case, a mail order widow upon arrival in a small Arizona ranch town riven with controversy.

Without ever laying eyes on her husband, the new wife/widow takes to her inheritance with dash and aplomb, not to mention instant motherhood. She displays the deering-do necessary to survive, particularly when neighbors attempt to steal her late husband’s property.

Cynthia’s “happily ever after” description fit into three sentences:

They had three more children.
Drake built Annie a large ranch house.
The ranch became a successful horse rearing ranch, selling horses to the military.

Lauraine Snelling‘s The Cowboy Angel features an anxious pregnant woman whose husband is long overdue from town with the necessary supplies. What will happen to her out in that sod house property they’ve fought so hard to “own up” if he does not return?

The “happily ever after” question made Lauraine laugh. Of course they were happy, but what happened next?

She didn’t know:

“I do not imagine my characters in other places and times. For myself, once I have told their stories, my characters are where they are supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to be doing. There are always new characters with new stories to be told.”

Margaret Brownley, a “seat of your pants” author, doesn’t know what happened to her characters either. She rarely knows what will happen to them while she writes the story! And since the Pony Express only lasted a few years owing to the building on the Transcontinental Railroad, we can assume her plucky heroine grasped the hero she saved from uncertain death and continued to lead an adventure-filled life.

We can only hope the hero lived up to that former spinster’s plans!

Margaret (via Twitter): “All my stories end happily ever after.”

Kathleen Fuller‘s characters wrestle with God’s plan for their lives in The Calling. The hero is a young man struggling with his destiny. Is he called to be a minister in his home town, or to the

burgeoning populations of the then-far west? It’s the tavern keeper’s daughter who recognizes the desires of his heart even as she falls in love with him. What would happen to them after the wedding?

“Millie and Elijah are pretty finite characters. They spent the rest of their lives in Unionville and lived happily ever after.”

Vickie McDonough‘s Buckskin Bride is the story of a headstrong buckskin-wearing young woman who has lived in a teepee with her father and sister for years. When the landowner comes to claim his property, well, did those two live happily ever after? And did Mattie ever put on a dress?

Of course they did.

At least the part about living happily ever after!

The other four stories have answers to these questions and stop in here over the next two weeks to find how their authors envisioned a future only dreamed about in A Pioneer Christmas Collection!

Except–what do you think? Can you see any of these folks living a peaceful life given what caused them to fall in love?

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