The Aftermath - A Gilmore Girls Revival Fan Fiction

Not a Chapter

I have something to say. I was going to wait another day or two to write this when I wasn't so emotional over it (and so it would come out more calmly), but many of your comments (not all) have been a little hurtful, so I decided to address this now. It's long-winded, but please bear with me.

First thing I want to mention is that you have no idea how much it's been bothering me to leave this story open, without finishing it for so long, even though I knew I had people who really loved it & wanted it to continue. Like, it was REALLY stressing me out to the point it was overwhelming me. I wanted nothing more than to be able to give that to you, but I refused to half-ass it or go through the motions because the story & the reader deserved better than that, so I saved it until there were times that I could write it with my whole heart. In many cases those times were few & far between.

But now that I've ended it & because it's not the ending you guys WANTED, some of you are getting hateful, and that's just awful! To act as if I didn't care about the story or its ending is just plain mean & wrong. I have feelings you know, and they're really being hurt right now by the reactions.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe I had a reason to do things this way? It's not really fair to attack me when you have no idea what I've been through in the last 2yrs since I started writing this. I had two of my siblings pass away TWO AND A HALF MONTHS APART, I've had the birth of my youngest son, I've had health issues of my own as well as my family members, I've moved, I've started a new job & I'm a major volunteer for my two older sons' Cub Scout pack. I've had so much REAL life stuff happen to me in the last two years that it would've been SO easy for me to give up on this story - but you know what? I DIDN'T give up. I always had this story in the back of my mind & I promised that I would always come back to it & end it.  I ALWAYS wanted to make sure it would do the actors & ASP justice - not that they'd ever consider reading it, but the chance that they could was always in my mind.

It was also really important for me to give it an ending that ASP would be proud of, so I got to thinking how I could bring it "full circle" & think about what ASP might've done - so I gave it an open-ended ending. Not because I planned to come back to it. Honestly, I don't ever plan to. But because it was the open-ended ending that ASP gave in AYITL (which I absolutely HATED, btw) that gave me the inspiration & the drive to want to go out & write my own ending.

I've done the same type of ending because I want to give you readers a jumping off point for your imaginations - I wrote this story to get closure from a "crappy" ending - and by crappy I mean not the ending I wanted. But realistically anyone could write the ending someone wants to see - not everyone has the guts to let them write their own. That was the whole point for me, and I'm starting to think it's why ASP did it, too. Because the story will always live on in our imaginations & have no true "end".

I want each and every one of you to use your imaginations to end the story how YOU see fit. This story belongs to all of us, and we all have our own version of a "perfect ending". This is my way of giving that to every single one of you, by leaving it open for you. So please stop assuming I half-assed it, or stopped caring, because never once was that the case. Never. I genuinely hope you enjoyed the whole story, even the ending - especially the ending - because I put my whole heart & soul into every single piece of it. But if you hate it, I'm sorry, I can't please everyone. Thanks for reading.

Lots of love, and thank you so much for being loyal readers. You were always why I came back to this story.

- Ashley