Author's Note:

Dear readers,

Until last year, my practice was always to finish a story before beginning to post it. I broke this long-standing habit with "Lighthouse Christmas," which I thought was going to be a fluffy, four-chapter Christmas family-fic, but soon turned into something much darker and much, much longer than I'd intended. I found the pressure to post on anything like a regular time-table difficult, and the amount of time it took to finish the story overwhelming, so I told friends afterwards that I would never do that again. It would have been wise if I'd stuck to that decision.

But, as you know if you've been reading this story, a few months later I found myself wanting to write another Christmas fic. I had some stuff in my drafts folder that I'd been trying to piece together for a very long time. There were quite a few bits and pieces, I'd finally figured out how I thought they should fit together, and I decided to take the plunge again.

That was a big mistake. The pieces I'd written-some of them years ago-have turned out to be far less compatible with each other than I'd thought. Others have become redundant: I began this story a long time ago, and ended up using some of my ideas, and even, it turns out, some of the sections I'd drafted for it, in other stories since then. To make matters worse, in trying to get through a section I hadn't written but knew I had to, I wrote a chapter in response to a current news story, posted it immediately, and realized the next morning that I'd created a whole new set of problems for myself that I didn't know how to work through. I'm afraid I still don't.

I do know that Matt Santos would never countenance torture. I'm quite certain that, faced with the news that the C.I.A. had been mistreating prisoners overseas, he would have immediately issued an executive order banning all forms of coercion and requiring that all prisoners be treated as they would in the U.S. I never meant to imply anything less for him-but that's one of the problems with posting as you write. You produce something that doesn't really add up, and then you're stuck with it.

I've been trying to think of ways to finesse that, but everything I come up with just creates a new set of problems. And I'm afraid I've lost the thread now. I don't like this story anymore, and I can't seem to take it where I wanted it to go-which was not, I hope you realize, to show Josh and Donna falling apart, but to show them working through some of the problems I thought might come up for them, working in those impossibly demanding jobs, and not having resolved their issues before they began. (The fact that Donna isn't wearing a ring in that scene where she wakes him in "Tomorrow" has always suggested to me that they really hadn't made a full commitment at that point.) I wanted to write a more realistic take on Josh in that first year than I did in "Life after Paradise," and weave that together with a plot line about him having to deal with Goodwin's rivalry for Matt's attention, and Matt having to make a real decision about which one of them he was going to listen to-because it drove me crazy that on the show we saw Matt not only seriously considering ditching Josh towards the end of the campaign, but putting Goodwin in charge of the transition and listening to his advice over Josh's, even when he wanted Josh to be his Chief of Staff.

I was interested, too, in Helen's attitude towards Josh, which I wanted to show eventually changing from the hostility we saw earlier in the campaign-though I thought that at first it would probably be increased by the move into the White House, which she obviously wasn't happy about. And then there were other characters whom we were either shown Josh making enemies of, or who seemed very likely to become enemies under the circumstances the show set up in that last season. That's what I wanted to explore with the anonymous letters that I was starting to show him receiving. They were meant to cause a lot of tension at first, but ultimately to become the catalyst for everyone's having to re-evaluate their understanding of Josh-which, as I guess has become more than obvious by now, is usually where I want my stories to go.

But I can't do it. At least, I can't do it now, and I really don't think I'm ever going to be able to. And I'm mortified. Starting to post a story and not finishing it is the one thing I've always promised myself I wouldn't do as a writer, because I absolutely hate it when other writers hook me in and leave me hanging, but in this case, I think it's probably better to draw a line and tell you now that I can't do this, rather than leave you waiting any longer, or risk sucking in any more readers and disappointing them.

I want to apologize to all of you for dropping you into my messy writing-process like this. I'm so sorry. I've always thought that, if nothing else, at least I had a reputation for finishing what I began, and I hate to let that go. But I don't want to keep you hanging, and I don't want to throw together a lousy story just for the sake of getting this done, either. It seems better to embarrass myself and admit that I made a mistake in starting to post this when it wasn't finished. I've posted enough that embarrasses me already, not to want to add something I know is bad from the start to the pile.

If the site lets me, I'll leave this note up for a week, and then-assuming I can figure out how to do it-take this story down. If I ever do get it written, I'll put it back up in its entirety, but I'm afraid at this point that seems pretty unlikely. If anyone still wants to know more about where this was going, just send me a PM, and I'll fill you in on what I had in mind-unsolved problems, warts and all.

My thanks to everyone who took the time to read this, especially to those of you who took the time to post encouraging comments, or to write to me privately with them. I appreciate that more than I can say.

With apologies and regrets,

Chai