Throwback Thursday #6: If I Don’t Try With You

When I was completing the merge of the Alternate History page, I was moving Traditions from Short Stories to the new page — but I hadn’t created an entry for it. And that made me think — were my other Hand Me Down sequels listed? Nope. Apparently, at some point, I removed all links to the prequel stories, and that means one of my absolute favorite pieces of writing has been basically unavailable on CG.

If you got to the end of that paragraph, and you’re thinking — prequels? Hand Me Down? What are these things? Let me back and start at the beginning.

In 2008, I started writing a story called Tangle (you can find it in the Fiction Graveyard). I planned out an entire universe with two or three sequels following it. Writing that story was a lot of a fun because Huma (humatheguma) was writing Mean at the same time and you’ll find some of the same next generation characters — particularly Amalia Zacchara. She was my creation, and I loaned her to Huma. We spent a lot of time in AIM back then talking about plans. I still love her stuff, and luckily for all of us, it’s still available at Fanfiction.net. Huma was one of my OG favorite people at The Canvas. She’s a kick ass defense attorney now and doing amazing things.

I never finished that original version of Tangle, and when I returned to writing in 2014, I quickly decided I would be reworking my universe and rewriting Tangle. I started working on it immediately in 2014. The first story, Feels Like Home, takes place in 2024, so I decided to write a series of prequels that would bridge that gap between 2008 and 2024. At the time I started writing in 2008, 2024 seemed like an impossibly forever away date, lol. Now, uh, it’s three years away. Insane.

I’ve written two prequels: If I Don’t Try With You and Lullabyes, plus a fluffy little short. I really love this universe and my idea of the next gen, so I do want to write it, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a long time. It used to have a separate WordPress installation (like Damaged), but when I decided to bring all of the stories under this umbrella and launch subsites (Mad World, Broken Girl), the link to HMD somehow got lost, and I never realized that neither of these stories weren’t linked on the main site.

Now that we kind of understand how If I Don’t Try With You got lost in the shuffle — let me talk about this story in particular.

The shooting of Michael in 2008 was one of the most shocking twists that GH took in 2008. The show took some serious risks that year, really showing us the affects of Sonny’s life on Michael. They made the mistake, however, of not differentiating between Sonny’s life and Jason’s life. Sonny made choices that led to Michael’s behavior, his shooting, and then later Kate’s shooting. Choices that Jason would never make.

Michael’s shooting was so shocking and catastrophic that it should have changed GH forever, except within about six months the only thing that had changed was that Jason and Elizabeth had broken their engagement, and Liason never really got back on track after that. I’ve always hated that fact, and when I decided to write a prequel, I knew I wanted my first story to be the story of what happened to Sonny and Michael, and why Liason stayed together.

I wrote some really great stuff for Jason and Elizabeth here, but this is by and away, my absolutely favorite Carly stuff. I cried writing some of these scenes in this story. I was really happy with it, and I still am, seven years later.

Lullabyes is a Scrubs fluff story about Patrick dealing with Robin’s pregnancy, so if you need a palate cleanser after Trying, you can check that out. You can round out the universe by reading Traditions, a short story set in 2010 at Fourth of July.

Have you read these stories before? Are you interested in more of this universe?

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