I've never done this before, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Redraw the Lines is the longest story by far that I've ever written, and it's also such a canon divergence that I thought it would be fun to look back at what inspired it. This might be a scary look into the inner workings of my thought process ;)


A long time ago, I had my first celebrity crush on a kid named Jonathan Jackson. He was on General Hospital at the time, and that was my first fandom and first fanfic writing experience. During the course of this crush, Jonathan made a movie called The Deep End of the Ocean with Treat Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's based on a book of the same name by Jacquelyn Mitchard that I loved.

From Amazon's page about the book: Both highly suspenseful and deeply moving, The Deep End of the Ocean imagines every mother's worst nightmare—the disappearance of a child—as it explores a family's struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds.

The book is told from two POVs – the mother's and the brother's – and spans about ten years with this family that all but fell apart in the wake of the toddler's kidnapping. I found the book very moving, and I loved that it was told from two POVs because they were very different. The mother could barely function for years, and the brother was holding so much guilt that he was very troubled as a teenager. Then, the little boy they thought they'd never see again, knocked on their door as a teenager offering to mow their lawn. He had no idea that he'd ever been kidnapped, and he was thrown into this family that he didn't know. It's heart-wrenching drama at its best.

This was a story that's stayed with me for a long time, and it was ultimately the inspiration for Neal Hughes. My story started to take shape when I was re-watching the show, and it was mentioned that there was nothing known about Neal's childhood – no record of him prior to his eighteenth birthday. That's the kind of thing that jumps out at me, as a writer – 18 years of blank slate to get Neal to where he is today!

I'd also had this idea about Neal attending an FBI holiday party and flirting with a woman that he finds out later is Hughes' daughter. There was life or death stuff in the middle there that really cemented their relationship in a way that meant that Hughes would have to deal with the possibility of Neal being his son-in-law. It's a story that I haven't seen in the fandom, and I liked it but could never get the initial story on the page.

Around the time that idea was failing, I started to wonder what Hughes would think if Neal was actually his son. How would that work? How would Hughes have not known that Neal was his son this entire time? How would Neal not know that he was a Hughes? When these questions started popping in my brain, I started thinking about The Deep End of the Ocean and what it would be like if Neal had been missing for 20+ years. Thinking about how it would affect him and the Hughes family got me really excited for the story, and I knew it was something I would be able to write.

It's an alternate universe that has quickly become one that I'm very proud to have written. Each of my 'verses holds a special place for me, but this is one that I have had a lot of fun writing and sharing with everyone. (Now the editing process is a whole other story, and I have some deleted scenes I might share at some point, but the actual writing was amazing. I had several of those moments when the words flowed as if they'd already been written.)

As a side note, while I was plotting Neal Hughes in my head, I saw that a sequel had been written to The Deep End of the Ocean, and I quickly snatched that from the library's e-book collection to read on a business trip. It was… an odd way to go with the characters, but I enjoyed it once I got over my shock. Basically, the older brother makes a documentary about families who are still waiting for their missing children to come home. His brother – who had been kidnapped – also has a new baby that was suddenly kidnapped, and the hunt was on to find the person responsible. Really, I enjoyed reading about the dynamics of the family so many years later, but the actual plot is still a head scratcher.