A/n- Well here is the first chapter of the rewrite. I want to flesh out my characters better this time around. Especially Amber. I always thought I did wrong by her. I hope you enjoy. I'm looking for a beta reader if anyone is interested. Reviews are coffee to the soul.
At eighteen, Jess Mariano decided it was time to stop smoking the day he woke up coughing and didn't stop until the afternoon. To keep his mind off smoking and reduce his stress, he started writing.
"You read everything, no reason not to attempt to write," Sasha, his father's girlfriend reasoned when he lived with them. She gave him a red notebook and told him to write what was on his mind. She hardly knew him but sensed that at eighteen, Jess had a lot to figure out. He was living with his father, who he had never met until just recently.
He spent his days working and his night's writing. He found it therapeutic. When he left Venice Beach to go back to New York, he took the red notebook with him. On the pages, he worked out his frustrations with his father and his mother.
Then he started writing something that was all his.
Through a stroke of good luck, Jess found Matt and Chris, owners of a small publishing house in Philadelphia. In addition to publishing his book, The Subsect, Matt and Chris offered Jess a job. The three guys became fast friends, living together in the brownstone on Locust Street.
Soon after moving, Truncheon Books wanted to expand, but none of them knew how to expand a business. So Jess was offered a chance to take a few classes at the community college and become a partner in the business. Jess agreed and became a one-third owner of Truncheon.
Three years later the guys moved out and had their apartments. They had two bookstore locations and a fourth one slated to open in the fall. The original Truncheon Books on Locust was the main office, and they referred to it as "headquarters". Jess was the manager of the bookstores. He also edited Truncheons 'zine. He also focused on his writing and was nearly finished a new novel.
Truncheon offered editing services and built a reputation as a place for students to come to have their term papers edited. They were even recommended by professors at a few of the local colleges. When the economy took a dump in 2008 that kept Truncheon alive. They also edited novels in all phases of writing. Sometimes the author would publish with Truncheon, and sometimes the author was offered a bigger publishing deal. Matt was the head editor and oversaw all of Truncheons editing, while Matt and Chris helped out with the editing, but for the most part, it was Matt's job.
The fourth addition to Truncheon was used exclusively for bigger art exhibits and hosting art shows for local artists and poetry reading for artists just looking to get their art out. Chris was in charge of the art gallery and acquisitions. He was an artist himself.
When he first moved to Philadelphia, there was no doubt Jess was still in love with Rory Gilmore, but she broke his heart for the final time after she kissed him and then confessed she was still in love with her boyfriend, Logan Huntzberger.
After he got over the heartache, he did the only thing he could and moved on with his life. He found Amber Silva. She had pale blue eyes and almond brown colored hair. Her father was from Argentina and she spoke fluent Spanish. She loved to read and had aspirations to teach. He didn't think it was possible to love again after Rory, but he did.
The first time they met, she sat behind him in his English Literature class and asked to borrow a pen. He took one look at her and asked for her phone number. Matt and Chris had been on him about not having a life outside of Truncheon and partly because Amber was extremely smart and beautiful and he was fascinated by her.
He didn't call her right away. He actually didn't call her until Matt and Chris found her phone number and dared him to do it. So he took her to a movie and for the next three years, they were nearly always by each other's side. He never told her that Matt and Chris had dared him to call her and felt that all this time later, would serve no purpose.
He didn't want to hurt her. He, in fact, loved Amber and tried to be the boyfriend he didn't know how to be at seventeen.
Rory lived a quiet life. When she graduated from Yale, she took a job working for Hugo Grey covering Obama's campaign. She traveled the country by bus, covering the campaign stops for the presidential hopeful. The night Obama was elected president she was in Chicago.
When she got home from Chicago, her boyfriend Ian Michaels had been offered a job in Baltimore with the Daily Record, a business journal based in Baltimore, so she followed him.
She wrote freelance for Hugo and other publications, but eventually she needed a more permanent job, any job would do. There was a small paper about an hour's drive from to Baltimore in Fredrick, Maryland that needed a part-time assistant JR reporter. It was the lowest of "entry level" jobs, but she took it because she had too. She still wrote for Hugo and worked on freelance and spec articles for bigger publications. Ian and Rory moved in together mostly because it was the cheapest thing to do.
Ian had been a friend on the bus to Rory. He shared his notes and her best friend Lane's knowledge of music. They also both had iron clad stomachs and a love of coffee and junk food that she had only shared with her mother. It was not long before they started sharing a bed.
He was unlike anyone she had ever met. He had grown up in Baltimore with a single mother. His father left when he was two. However, his mother had come from Roland Park and they lived with Ian's grandparents in a huge home built in the 1800's.
He went to private school his whole life until he was expelled his senior year for not revealing the source of a teacher having an affair with a student. He graduated from the public school and lost an opportunity to go to Columbia University. He ended up going to community college and eventually went to a state school, where he graduated.
When Lorelai met him, she declared him the perfect man for her daughter and that was all the approval Rory needed to go from liking the guy, to falling head over heels for him. When Ian out-ate both Rory and Lorelai during a movie night Lorelai declared him an honorary Gilmore.
Eventually, her Ivy League education paid off when the editor of the paper in Fredrick retired and she applied for the position. So she and Ian had a long talk and decided to move so that they would each be within a half hour of each other. So they moved to Lisbon, Maryland, which was smaller than Stars Hollow with slightly less eccentric characters.
She should have been happy. She had a guy she loved, who she thought she would settle down with. She ran a paper with decent circulation before she was twenty-five. At twenty-four, Rory's wanderlust and she dreamed of seeing the world.
Being offered the editors job still in her early twenties was a dream come true for Rory and she loved her job but she didn't get to write anymore
As the editor, she could have assigned herself articles to write. When her Features staff writer became came down sick with the flu, she had to find something to replace it, but she did not want it to be known that she had done the writing, instead she used a fake name on the byline: Emily Hayden.
The article about the death of Micheal Jackson was picked up by the AP. Suddenly Emily Hayden was getting a lot of attention. A few national papers had rejected Rory Gilmore, but Emily Hayden was not getting the same rejection. Eventually, she started getting offers to be a guest writer in several online magazines, including an up and coming 'zine based out of Philadelphia.