on pivot points of the universe

I was wondering if anybody wondered about that! :D


I have not answered this outright yet, but I have been meaning to talk about it.

Yes, a couple of those earlier pieces have been tweaked a bit to reflect where I see their future ending up now. But that is really only like two pieces that needed to be changed though (mainly this one and this one), mostly to do with Justin. Most of Keri's stuff won't need a change (she will still meet Bentley later, although not for a while) and we never heard anything at all directly from Stephanie or Jeremiah. Keep in mind also that we never actually heard anything directly from Justin, either. It was all Keri's POV.

The thing is, that entire future really all hinged on this one event happening. It's kind of like Back to the Future. You know, where if you change this one little thing in the past, it skews the whole future universe into this alternate timeline. This thing that was supposed to happen the first night Jeremiah got home didn't end up happening. And then I wrote other drafts where it still ended up happening, only later. But then I began to feel like I was having to force that thing to happen just to keep the original future when my characters (apart from Jeremiah) just really really didn't want that to happen. And they were too smart and vigilant to let it happen, they were too aware and trying too hard to prevent it, so that it became out of character for them to allow that event to happen at all.

But without that event happening, everything that followed couldn't happen anymore, either. (Save for one possible way that it *could* still happen, but I am 99.5% certain that Justin would not let it go down that way, no matter what the consequences.) So the whole future changed for them and now different things will happen.

Another thing was that in those couple of pieces you read before, what would have been disclosed eventually is that many of them were lying to each other. So it may not be as totally far off as it might seem based on first impressions. Jeremiah, I think you could imagine, knowing what we know of him now—when he told Keri that he and Stephanie were happy and making it work—was totally lying. Another secret—Justin was lying to Keri that he hadn't heard from Stephanie in five years, because while he didn't know exactly where she was the whole time, they were talking.

It was a very dramatic, complicated, harrowing story that I am quite happy to say cannot happen exactly the same way anymore with the changes that have occurred. Now, I wouldn’t decline to write a story JUST because I didn’t want to write an ugly story—I would do it if I felt that was what was true to their characters, but it didn't feel true enough so I had to give it up.

I am noting this as the danger of telling a flashback story before you are 100% certain how it's going to turn out!

One thing I will say though is that the baby Stephanie is pregnant with now was always meant to be Justin's child in every timeline, in every version, and in every situation. However, in one of their alternate futures, there was one version where Jeremiah *made* a third child happen, but I am 99.5% certain that won't happen anymore.

There is a character named Jessica that was mentioned before and could still end up happening though. Not exactly the way she would have happened before, but she might show her face one of these days. She has factored into about 50% of the possible drafted futures of this story, in one way or another.

I hope this won't be too confusing for anyone. No, it won't turn out exactly the way it might have first seemed, but what you would have found out was that it was never exactly how it seemed anyway.