Jacob Carter, a lonely genius who makes one different choice (TuskedCarpenter again)

Q: What is this story?

A: It’s an alternate version of the ‘Jacob Carter’ branch.

At the end of 2019, DFang posted the first chapter of the story of ‘Jacob Carter, a lonely genius with bad luck’. Over the seven months that followed, he posted another eleven chapters, then stopped. Five years later, I read his chapters, and I could tell where the story wanted to go, so I picked up where he left off, and then started exploring new directions. In terms of creative writing, I’m like a coral: I do better when I build off an existing structure.

Over the past year, I’ve extended the story by more than thirty chapters, and I’m nowhere near done. I’ve put way too much thought into Jacob, the people in his life, and the world in which they live, so much so that I’ve written dozens of pages pointing out the hidden jokes and explaining the sneaky references. Because I’m using those original twelve chapters as the basis for the rest of the story, I’ve reread them probably more times than anyone else. And probably more closely than anyone else, possibly including DFang himself.

Which leads us to Jacob’s Mistake.

In chapter 1, Jacob misses the bus after work, and then his coworker Kate offers him a ride home. And he knows this would really take her out of her way, so he says no.

And recently, it occurred to me to wonder: what if, instead, he said yes? Well – given what’s in the original twelve chapters, and in all the content I’ve written based on them, I was able to figure out quite a lot of things about this new timeline.

Some things happen earlier, or differently, than in the other timeline. Other things happen later, or may not happen at all.

Q: Do I have to read the original Jacob branch to understand this one?

A: You’ll definitely get more out of this story if you read the original Jacob branch first, but I’m doing my best to have this stand on its own.

Actually, the two branches might count as spoilers for each other.

Q: Will this branch go for as many chapters as the main timeline branch?

A: No idea. Probably not. It’ll go for a while.

Q: Are you going to stop the main timeline branch?

A: I’m not going to stop the main timeline branch just because I’ve started writing the alternate timeline. I’ll stop eventually. If nothing else, I expect to have a finite lifetime. I do have more chapters planned – and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to bring it to a proper conclusion.

Q: Is this fanfic?!? Are you writing fanfic of your own work?!?

A: Yep. Cool, eh?

Q: Why did you write an introduction instead of just starting with the story?

A: First, it’s important that you understand what’s going on here, and why the first dozen or so paragraphs of the story look familiar. Second, I like giving my chapters clever titles, and I can’t do that if the first chapter is linked directly from the hub page.