Desperate Lies

Behind the Scenes

*Trigger Warning* Literally every bad thing that happened to Eve is mentioned in this chapter sooooo yeah.

Welcome to the Behind the Scenes chapter, where I tell you all the in's and out's that went into writing these nerdy-ass fanfictions.

The story is called "Desperate Lies" because most of the story revolves around Eve lying to someone; whether it be lying to Paul to stay safe, lying to Chris about Paul beating her, or lying to herself about her mental and physical health problems. It comes from a line in Motionless in White's song, "Disguise".

Originally, the idea of Eve having health problems, cutting her hair off, etc. was going to be put into a sequel for "The Immaculate Misconception" (which was my original story that this was a rewrite of) but after looking back at TIM for ideas, I cringed at so many parts of that story, that I just decided to re-write the whole thing and include the elements that I'd originally planned for the sequel. I liked the basic storyline of TIM, but I thought I could do it so much better. I will not be deleting the original because I know so many people like it - and now you can read back on that story and compare the two, haha!

In the epilogue, Chris and Eve have a baby girl named Elena, which is the same name I had for their daughter in the epilogue of the original story.

Body Image Issues are something that I feel like I've briefly mentioned in other stories - mentioning that the female protagonist has scars, blemishes, etc. but that she's still beautiful - however, drastic issues and food struggles are something that I've wanted to cover for a long time, especially since I've battled with them myself. The reason why I chose Eve specifically for that topic is because pre-E.D. I describe her as "curvy". Now, granted, everyone has a different definition for what that may look like, but I did describe her as having bigger breasts, bigger thighs, etc. and I did this because it makes it that much more drastic when Eve does develop her disorder; the weight loss is that much more dramatic, if that makes sense.

Since Eve has anemia, she bruises much easier than the average person does, which made the beatings she received from Paul even worse and more visible to anyone Eve may encounter. Apart from coming from a more conservative background, this is obviously largely in part of why Eve wears sweaters almost all the time before leaving Paul.

In the original story *spoiler if you haven't read it* I have Eve forgive Paul and resume their relationship as normal - and I wanted to change that in this story. In my own personal experience, I have learned that it is possible to forgive someone without letting them back into your life. You can let someone go without forgetting that they caused you harm. When you abuse someone as badly as Paul did Eve, there's probably no rekindling that relationship and moving on like nothing happened. For those reasons, I made it a priority in this story for Eve to be able to let Paul go and move on, but not let someone as toxic as him back into her life.

In the original story, I also gave Paul some "good" qualities, which I decided to remove in this story as well. You can make the argument that some abusers have tragic backstories all you want, but that does not give them an excuse to be an abuser. Keep in mind, I was around fourteen-ish when I wrote the original story, so I was very naïve. This time around, I didn't want there to be any sympathy for Paul in the story because I don't believe that we should give sympathy to abusers.

Since some of you may be new readers, I also want to put it out there that I know that not all religious people are bad. In fact, I'm a Christian. However, as a Christian, I feel that it is my duty to call about bigotry when I see it, and I've definitely used this story as a means of expressing some of the pain that I myself have experienced in the church and among those in it, but that certainly doesn't mean that everyone in the church is bad. Paul is obviously a very extreme (and fictional) example.

I also realized that even though I had stories in the past where miscarriages happened, I realized that I'd never written a story where Chris was the one who had gotten the protagonist pregnant which then resulted in a miscarriage. I also wanted to give that topic a little bit more coverage than I had in my past stories, as I believe it's important to talk about.

Despite the many differences in this story from the original, there are still many themes that stay the same.  *Spoilers if you haven't read the original* Chris and Eve met because of Eve's art, they met in secret as friends (often in the woods) before they started dating, they broke up for a period and then got back together, Eve is an art student, Eve moves in with Chris super fast, and there's probably a couple more similarities that I'm forgetting, but I think I did a decent job of keeping some things the same while adding a few differences to give the story some more drama.

I made Eve a Master's student this time around instead of a Bachelor's student like in the original mostly for age reasons. Obviously, you can go to college at any age. However, in the original story (which was written several years ago when Chris was younger than he is now) I had written Eve as age 22. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of age-gap relationships that work just fine, but it was just my preference to make Eve a Master's student so that I could make her a bit older. However, in the original story, the age gap between Eve and Chris is six years, and I kept that the same in this story.

When Eve kisses Chris for the first time, she does so by saying "Let me...Let me just...try something." Which is what she says when she kisses Chris for the first time in the original story.

When Chris and Eve find out Eve is pregnant in the epilogue, Chris asks, "Are you...?" And Eve responds, "Pregnant? Expecting? Withchild? Take your pick." Which is how she tells Chris she's pregnant in the original story.

That's all for now! I'll be posting my next story soon (the pandemic has given me an excuse to write more haha!) so be on the lookout!

xoxo, Scissorhands