Throwback Thursday #5: Shadows

All TBTs have a “Read More” where I talk about writing the story and it’s part in my writing history.

For this week, I’m dipping into another part of CG’s past — the return after a five year break.

Between 2008-2014, I didn’t publish anything. The last story I wrote was a short called, Traditions, and I think it went up sometime in late 2008. These Small Hours might have also been the last thing I posted. It’s hard to remember exactly now. I can remember the moment when I completely lost interest in GH: the day in 2009 Nikolas grabbed Elizabeth and kissed her without permission to prove something stupid to Rebecca. I had already been dipping out after Claire Coffee left the show (as Nadine) and Kate’s character was fading out, but then Jason and Sam were getting back together and I thought they were going to put Nikolas and Elizabeth together or reunite LL2 (AND THEY DID BOTH AND FIRED SEXY GREG BOOOOO). I was irritated AF and I noped out.

I was starting my first year at Rutgers, and I got really busy immediately. By the time I resurfaced to consider watching GH again, they killed off Jake and then five seconds later, they attempted to fire Becky. That was in 2011. I decided to be completely done with GH. The original CG domain had already expired at that point, so I had planned to be completely retired.

Ironically, what drew me back to General Hospital was learning that Ron Carlivati and Frank Valentini were joining GH as the new writer/EP. I had watched OLTL while Scott Clifton was on the show, and I’d liked their writing well enough so I thought I’d give GH a chance again. This was the summer of 2012 and I started watching literally as the water poison crisis was getting underway. I loved that story. It was over the top, it was insane, but it was interesting and fun.

Even after Jason left, the show kept me interested. I was excited that AJ was back and finally getting know Michael while Sonny and Carly were getting roasted alive, I was invested in Patrick’s happiness and FELIX!!! Then Sabrina resurrected the Nurse’s Ball — anyway, I was back watching in 2012 and stayed watching for almost three years. (The Jake Doe story pushed me out again because I knew they would make my girl the bad guy). I didn’t come back to writing though.

That happened while I was living in London. I moved there for school in September of 2013 and stayed for a year. It was super hard to get GH episodes at that point, and I was watching clips and torrenting episodes to keep up. I decided to reopen my fanfiction archive and convert it to WordPress. I started doing that in January 2014. At the same time, I started looking at my old stories – and one that I had never finished was the OG version of Shadows (Fiction Graveyard).

I can’t remember now why I decided to revisit Shadows as the first longform piece of writing in my return. I wrote an episode tag first, The Things You Can’t Undo, but Shadows was my first attempt to really write Jason and Elizabeth after all this time.  While I think writing A Few Words Too Many convinced me I was really back, it was Shadows that made me remember how much I loved writing Elizabeth.

Because this OG version of Shadows was written and published VERY early in my return (February-March 2014), some might have missed it. Have you read it before?

So the next time you tweet #FireFrank, lol, remember — I liked Frank and Ron once enough to return to watching GH. How ironic is that??