Hey readers,

I am going to structure this chapter as a letter to "readers like you", describing the chapter itself and then take this opportunity to directly speak to you to explain my motivations behind this fic.

Chapter 12: Crimson and Clover

Please go to the link below and read the chapter:

s/6029418/1/Crimson-and-Clover

Finally, we get to where my first Ghostwriter fanfic, Crimson and Clover, fits into Wake Up. This fic/chapter takes place during the morning after where the previous chapter, "Everybody" ,ended. It's a story of Alex, Tina, and Gaby reliving an old memory of when Alex and Tina first became seriously romantically involved. Think of this as my "high school rom-com" chapter.

Although I'd like to think they were serious when they "dated" during the show, obviously with Tina being ten-years-old and Alex twelve and the fact that this was a PBS show, they could not take their relationship to the next level or delve into it any deeper than the show already had. I felt it made the most sense for Alex and Tina to rekindle their romance at this point in their lives and obviously, the teenaged years and high school are the perfect settings to write this as one's self-centered view on life plus hormones heightens everything you're going through and feeling.

Obviously, the setting that I originally envisioned for this chapter has now changed. Instead of Summer 2006, imagine September 2005. When I came back to this fanfic and was planning and outlining the timeline of events, I thought the summer of 2006 was too late to jump-start the events of this story, especially for Tina and Alex and what I have planned for them. Just imagine there's a heat wave in New York in September. It happens.

I also wrote originally wrote Alex's apartment to be a bit grungier than it is now, but that was because back in 2010, I was living in an apartment at the time that mirrored my original vision. Now that I've lived in Brooklyn for seven years, I now have a much better idea of how Alex's apartment should look like, and someone like Alex with his NYPD Detective-Investigator salary should be able to afford something better even if Brooklyn and NYC in general is expensive.

I don't know how many of you have already read this one-shot, but I would still appreciate any feedback or impressions of this story that you can provide.

Now if you guys can indulge me, I would like to give you all some background of why I was inspired to write this story and why it has been gnawing at me all this time.

Why Am I Just Now Updating This Story

I need to apologize to readers who actually originally read my fics nine years ago for taking so long to get this story going. Let me explain why it has taken so long.

First off, I went through a lot of life changes from when I first published Crimson and Clover to now. I was in college when I originally conceived and drafted this fan fic. At the time, I was living in New Orleans and imagining what New York was like. I planned on finishing this fic around 2010. Now that we're in 2019, and I just now started working on this again, I obviously did not meet my goal.

Between 2010 to 2019, I graduated college, then moved to New York from my hometown of New Orleans to attend law school. Obviously, law school took all of my time for three years. After I finished law school, I started my legal career and am still there. That has also taken and is still taking most of my time and there are days where I am too tired to do anything after being in the office/court and I just want to veg out with Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime/etc. Also me simply living life and socializing and making new connections also dominated my life as well.

Although I was angry at myself for not finishing this fic in 2010 as I originally planned, I am also glad I waited this long because I believe I now have the ability to look back at 2005 and my twenties and to truly reflect on what I wanted to say with this work. Of course, with age and the ability to reflect, I lost the element of living the same life and being in the same headspace as the characters in the story. However, I believe I gained something better in exchange.

Here's another added benefit of taking so long to work on this story. At the time I was planning this fic, the characters were only about four or five years older than the setting I had imagined. Now they are thirteen-fifteen years older, so the fic I am writing now has become much more of a time capsule than I originally planned. Trying to remember life from 14-15 years ago actually has made it more fun to write, though I'm sure it has also led to some unintentional but hopefully harmless anachronisms.

I also think I HAD to move to New York to capture the sense and energy of the City. There really is nothing like it and you have to be in it to be able to capture it. It really helps me understand the characters in a way I do not believe I could have as authentically done so back in 2010. Something like simply sweating my way through waiting for the subway after it being delayed till the end of time or having to run errands among the sea of people and just hearing all the conversations from people of different cultural backgrounds, ages, life experiences, etc. does so much to help you get into the proper headspace than imagining it from afar does. Though, I bet superior writers than myself are much more capable of doing that than I am able to do.

The reason I came back to this fic was because even as I grew older and gone through major changes in my life and my career takes up so much of my time, the seeds of this fic kept gnawing at me, as did the fact that I started a project I never finished. I found myself still wanting to explore the themes of what we now call "adulting", observing the world changing through these eyes, and exploring what friendship means and how deep life can be. I also loved the constriction of having to draft an "original" story through the parameters set up by the original show and dealing with the fact that these characters have a past solving mysteries and interacting with this magical/ghost-like being.

The reason it took so long for me to just decide to do it, outside real world life obligations getting in my way, was because I let this project overwhelm me and intimidate me. I know I'm not a "real" writer or even a "competent" one, so knowing that made me think I simply was not capable of writing the story that I outlined and imagined myself writing in the way that matched my ambitions. But then one day, when this fic overwhelmed my thoughts, I just decided to try it. The result was Lenni's chapter: "Rain and Tears". I'm still trying to improve the structure of my chapters and really am working on self-editing, as you can tell with the grammatical mistakes and typos of some of the earlier chapters (this was easier when I had betas for Crimson and Clover and "The Prologue" of this fic). I am planning on fixing those things and reuploading those chapters to provide "cleaner" versions.

Now that I actually published some chapters, I simply have to write this story. It's amazing what you can do once you stop talking yourself out of it and "just do it". The quality may be "iffy" but I'm not going to let that stop me anymore.

Forgive me if there are spans of time in-between updates. Some times real life does get in the way, but know I will always come back to it.

Why I Wanted to Write This Story in the First Place

So the tl;dr version:

I am still in love with this show. It has shaped my worldview and life in ways that I can't even describe. I realized this show was basically my dream show/book I have always wanted to see on television/read. It has provided me a foundation to work through my writing ideas and creative thoughts that have themes this show touches upon. It also allows me to exercise my creative writing skills and gain more confidence in them that may jumpstart any original works I might want to develop.

The longer version:

It all started with a seed that was planted when I rediscovered the show over nine years ago and was so unsatisfied with how the show prematurely ended. Taking my frustrations with feeling this deep dissatisfaction, I started to write ideas of what I wanted or felt would have happened had the show continued into perpetuity.

I first watched this show when I was around the same age as the Ghostwriter team back in the early-to-mid-1990s. I was in awe of this show and how much I related to the characters. They even used the same textbooks I was using. I did not realize how rare it was to have a show like this exist, but now that I'm an adult in my thirties and having watched countless television programs and films, I now seriously appreciate how hard the creators of the show worked to make the setting and characters relatable. I even appreciate they for the most part did not hire professional child actors. I can sacrifice professional line-readings if what I get in exchange are characters who felt like real living and breathing kids that I could easily envision myself going to school with.

I also discovered when I rewatched the show those many years ago was that so many of my own personal values and politics were shaped by this show. This show valued representation before all the calls for diversity in Hollywood. It valued authenticity. It also made Fort Greene and New York in general look like the place where I HAD to live. Just seeing kids taking the subway to go to South Ferry and see the Statue of Liberty (and New Jersey!) just blew my mind. I wanted that life. Now that I sort of have it, I just have to remember how much I wanted it when I get annoyed with being in the City some times.

At their age, I was simply stuck walking home from school to my lower-class suburban home and being isolated from different kinds of people than the ones I went to school with. I also loved how the show wrote the characters true to their "backgrounds" and "family upbringing" but also played against stereotypes.

Being a budding film buff myself, simply seeing that this show made a Vietnamese-American girl, who was also the first one in her family born in the United States and actually SPOKE Vietnamese on the show, wanting to be a film director and write stories instead of the way Asian-Americans were normally portrayed in Hollywood was beyond words. It also matched my worldview of how I wanted characters of color to be portrayed. This is why meaningful representation matters. I don't know if the creators of this show understand just what they have done for me by writing it the way that they have and including diverse writers to add authenticity and dignity. They were simply ahead of the curve.

One thing I also loved about this show was how beautifully and intricately they synthesized the educational lessons/facts into a compelling mystery arc that motivated kids to actively watch the show and pay close attention to the details. There are facts that have stayed with me well into my adulthood (such as how the letter "e" is the most used letter in the English language and how the letter "u" always follows the letter "q").

I think for my fic, since I don't have a background in educational programming nor am I even a good writer, I some times become indulgent in adding educational tidbits into this story and it can be executed in an unsophisticated manner. However, I try my hardest to utilize the concept of "Chekhov's Gun" where every element of the story should contribute to the whole. So even if there are some facts, interactions, or asides in this story that seem random or unneeded, it is usually because I plan on utilizing them in some way in a future chapter. If I can't, then I just hope it adds to the flavor, atmosphere, and environment of the lives these characters are living every day.

What am I Trying to Say with This Story?

Rebecca Sugar, creator of Steven Universe,put it best. She wanted to play with the idea of escapism by having magical creatures be fascinated by regular people and regular life. It's sort of like a reverse magical fantasy. I believe that relates to the character of Ghostwriter himself, what I'm planning with him and his story, and how he sees the ordinary main characters of this fic.

The themes Sugar wanted to explore and her desire to make a story free of deep cynicism and mean-spirited sarcasm while emphasizing empathy was exactly the story I wanted to tell here. So Steven Universe really helped me figure out what I wanted this story to be, and to sound like to the reader.

Ghostwriter set up an incredible foundation with such deep and diverse characters with so many different interests that they are so flexible that they are incredibly perfect vessels to communicate what I wanted to say on a great number of topics. The most fun part is being able to establish these characters and then see how they will react when faced with new situations and environments while still staying true to who they were in the show and how they evolved in my fic.

This would not be possible if the original characters on the show were not already incredible characters that provide so much for a writer. Us fans KNOW who these characters are and they feel so real because of it. I'm just taking the complexities and complications the show touched upon and seeing how much further can I go while still having them be "real" and "grounded" and read as if they are the same characters from the show living in the same world the show established.

Speaking of these characters and my own fascination with "ordinariness", I do not intend any of these characters to be larger-than-life figures. I think too many shows and films focus on characters and settings like that, especially nine years later with the rise of superhero films and what-not. Instead, I wanted to portray regular, everyday people having to deal with real life obligations, stress, issues, and relationships, who may become seriously successful or may find contentment with simple "ordinary" existence, while having to deal with something extraordinary or possibly be put in incredibly extraordinary/dangerous situations (especially in my follow-up Ghostwriter fics that I'm outlining right now).

There is something incredible with living life and sharing such tonally varied experiences with everyone you meet and having them share their experiences with you because everybody in the world has no choice but to do it. I think that fits with the spirit of the original show. These kids were not compelling because they were amazing. They were compelling because they were incredibly relatable and ordinary kids who we could easily imagine ourselves being, but through hard work, education, and friendship, they were able to perform extraordinary feats. I think because these characters felt so real to me to the point of me loving them so much that I was inspired to write a fan fiction about them, the show taught us all a lesson that we ourselves through our ordinariness can also achieve incredible things if we put the work into it and we are lucky enough to be able to take advantage of opportunities presented to us.

I am also using this fic as an experiment to see if one cohesive narrative structure with consistent characters can successfully play with different tones. After watching countless television programs on TV/Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/etc. I realized that a part of me is dissatisfied with how even the most critically-lauded shows all need to follow formulas and have a certain look and consistent tone because audiences are perceived to not being able to handle any deviation of those things within the same show. It's as if you need to know what the entire show is about within the first five minutes of the first episode. It all seems TV is boxed up into strict categories even when there's attempts to fuse those categories.

In short, I sort of want to use this story to see if I can play with expectations and play with the tones to better capture how wild and varied and sometimes extremely contrasting real life is. Like life is not just one cynical dark place, it's not just this light-hearted safe colorful comedy, it's not just this melodramatic romance with comedy safely sprinkled through, etc. It's all of that and more at the same time. I want to see if I can capture all the colors of life in one work.