Balancing Heaven And Earth
Bonus Chapter: A collection of alternative storylines and outtakes

For those who are interested, here are a few notes that I have found in my folders for both of these stories. I took the cursive parts directly from those notes, so they are a bit messy and unorganized.

For "As It Is In Heaven", my very first summary is maybe the most shocking way this universe could have turned out:

Sheldon has a heart attack. He moves back home and reconnects with his sister who, along with meemaw, gets him to join the local church choir. There he meets a mysterious woman, Amy, who, as he later finds out, is trapped in an abusive marriage. Together with Missy and his meemaw he tries to help that woman and falls hopelessly in love with her on the way.

And then I was completely stuck and unable to write it. I just could not write Amy married to someone else, and I definitely couldn't write her experiencing the horrible things that Missy experienced. It was only when I switched Amy's and Missy's roles, that it started to make sense. But then, of course, Amy had to have a connection to Sheldon's family, and that's how the Amy/Connie-friendship was born.

I also had something very different planned for Sheldon, which I had already included in the first chapters, before I scrapped it.

In this universe, instead of contracts, Sheldon's second passion next to science has always been music. He has been a hobby conductor for some time. Also, he sometimes hears melodies and songs in his mind that give him a clue about what social situation he is encountering or what mood other people are in. For example, when Bernadette joined the group, he kept hearing "The flight of the bumblebee". When he moves to Medford, he can't stand Amy at first, but he keeps hearing love songs in her presence and thinks he's going crazy. One of the first clues about what's happening to Missy is that he hears depressing, slightly scary songs when she is around.

I already mentioned that Sheldon was supposed to have another heart attack. In hindsight, I am really, really happy for not going down that road. If I had, the plan was the following:

Sheldon fell into a coma after his second heart attack. He wakes up a few weeks later with Amy sitting by his bedside. She is pregnant with his child. She moves into his apartment and nurses him back to health.

This was inspired by the movie this whole universe is based upon, because there, the protagonist, Daniel had a second heart attack and died. In the sequel movie (which I have never watched), it was revealed, that his love interest, Lena, was pregnant at the time of his death. I cannot tell you, how glad I am in hindsight, for choosing not to go down that route.

Next, let me share my notes for "Balancing Heaven And Earth":

First of all, the whole "Pasadena-Sheldon" vs. "Medford-Sheldon" was supposed to be a much bigger part of the story and I had a lot more Pasadena-chapters planned, for which I have made the following notes:

Amy gets really frustrated with Pasadena-Sheldon. He's completely absorbed in his world of game nights and comic books. Raj, who has a huge crush on her and is frustrated with his friends too, ditches them more and more and takes Amy out to all the events that Pasadena-Sheldon isn't interested in. At some point, Sheldon notices the rift between himself and Amy and how much closer Raj has gotten to his fiancée. Jelly-Shelly appears and is determined to make things right again.

Here's another one about how Amy could have found out about Sheldon's secret:

Amy is videochatting with Sheldon who has to spend another week in Pasadena and is working in his office. As he is called out of his office by one of his friends, with the videochat still running, Kripke appears and "innocently" asks Amy about the impending move and career-change that she has no idea about.

Joshua's story could also have been very different, as evident in the following note:

Tired of being bullied, Joshua starts acting up in school and getting into fights. When he gets in trouble for it, he lashes out at both Sheldon and Missy and tells them, at least he isn't a victim like them. He refuses to spend any time with Sheldon after that, until months later when he runs away to Pasadena after getting expelled from school.

Then here is something different for Raj and Missy, in a scenario where it wasn't Joshua who left the mean notes for Missy:

Missy keeps getting threatening messages but keeps them to herself. During a visit from Sheldon's friends, Raj notices a suspicious shadow by Mary's house. He sneaks up on the culprit and tackles him to the ground. It's one of Robbie's cousins, looking for revenge. Missy runs outside and they call the police. Raj is shocked when he hears about the threatening messages and the two of them start talking. Much later in the story, when the two of the are already friends, he offers to put Missy's profile on a dating website, like had had done for Sheldon a long time ago. He spends a lot of time trying to find her a match until one day, he realizes, he's the perfect match for her.

There was also going to a little twist with Amy's job. Remember, she chose to work part time, so she could have Fridays off to focus on Neurobiology. But she did not anticipate who the school was giving the rest of the science lessons to.

A few weeks after the schoolyear had started, Amy feels confused because she never met the new science teacher, who had taken on all Friday lessons, in the teacher's lounge. After some investigation she figures out where to find him: The new science teacher is actually the new football coach who needed to teach a few lessons for a full-time position. To her horror, this man has no interest in science and knows nothing about what he's supposed to teach. She confronts the principal who tells her, it's the best they could do. There was no one else who was interested in only teaching one day. She realizes that this situation has dire consequences for science-interested High School students, which puts a lot of pressure on her to come to a decision soon.

For a short time, I had planned to do a Kripke-redemption arc instead of having him stop working at the university. After all, there must have been a deeper reason for him to go after Sheldon's office, right?

After Sheldon and Amy's meeting with Siebert, where he agreed on all their terms and offered them the perfect conditions to return to California, Sheldon goes to his office to file some paperwork. Barry Kripke is sitting at his desk, bitter about the outcome of this whole situation. The two scientists converse about their complicated history. Barry tells him, he's lucky, because he has friends who stand up for him and a fiancée who forgave him for going behind her back. It must be nice, to have people he could count on. And that he could have at least given up his office, when he already had everything else. Sheldon tells Barry off and points out that maybe he would have the same things if he didn't always act like the sleazy dirtbag he is. After a heated discussion about their past, about the bullying they both endured for different reasons and a recollection of all the conflicts they had since working together, they come to a new understanding, where they admit that they respect each other as scientists but probably won't ever be friends. At last, Sheldon thanks Barry for saving his life in the first place and tells him he is welcome to sit with him and his friends during lunch at times. Barry of course makes a sarcastic remark in response, but a few weeks later, he takes Sheldon up on his offer.

Because apparently I love angsty chapters, there was something very sad planned around the time of Sheldon and Amy's wedding:

During the rehearsal dinner, Ruth suffers a stroke. At the hospital, Daniel is devastated because they lost so much time and now, he is about to lose her. He feels immense guilt because he has wasted all these years. Ruth wakes up and somehow, is convinced that their lives have gone completely different. She thinks that she and Daniel have been married with kids for more than fifty years. Amy, Sheldon and Daniel listen as she joyfully recounts story after story from this happy life, until, finally, she dies in Daniel's arms. Sheldon and Amy consider postponing the wedding, but Daniel asks them to go forward with it, because Ruth had been rooting for them from day one. Many months later, Sheldon and Amy name their first child after Ruth.

And then, there was another love story supposed to unfold:

Mary is being secretive. She has all kinds of events and appointments in the early evening that she does not want to talk about. Along the way, they realize, she must have a new boyfriend. Turns out, the new boyfriend is Jeremy. Those two stubborn Texans develop a peculiar relationship that everyone can only shake their heads at, but it works for them. As Jared and Greg move into Connie's house with adopted twins, Mary forms a close relationship with her "step kids" and "step grandkids".

But there was also a different version of who might live in Connie's house:

At the end of the day, Raj decides that his life in California and his friendships do not bring him joy anymore. He takes on a job at the Space Station in Houston. The friendship between him and Missy deepens and over time, they fall in love. When Amy and Sheldon move to California, Missy and Raj take their offer to move into Connie's house together.

So, that's it. I hope you found some of my notes as amusing as I did.

Thank you for reading!