Cape Heights Volume 1 Part 1

By Michele Ceron

Welcome to Cape Heights! A fictional soap opera town in coastal Oregon!

 

Do you love watching daytime soap operas on tv? Have you ever considered reading a soap in book format? One where you can read episodes back- to- back sans commercials and censorship? Then Cape Heights is the addictive daytime tv soap to get sucked into! This original and unique soap opera is written in screenplay format so that it's visualized in your mind exactly as you would see it on tv!

 

Volume 1 returns to the cast of characters 5 years later from where we left them in the original online soap opera role play world! The Rutledge family finds themselves struggling to keep their company afloat years after the Chow family mafia was dismantled. Daniel put the company in the hands of his second wife, Sarah, who is the ex-wife of his son Bradley. Brad and Sarah struggle to work together to get the company back on its feet while Julian and Chelsea left town several years ago to pursue personal interests………….

 Can this stubborn and splintered family be brought back together to save their company?

 

Trisha Davis is an aspiring singer/recording artist who went to LA to hit it big but soon found out fame wasn't what it's cracked up to be. She not only left Cape Heights but also her long- time boyfriend Adrian Emerson for her singing career; while committing the ultimate betrayal in order to do it……

 Can Adrian ever forgive her? Or does he have a betrayal of his own that will have Trisha rethinking her desire to get back together with him?

 

Five years ago hotel owner Darius Hilton was in a relationship with Noelle Emerson but got deeply entrenched in the personal life of his ex and best friend, Naomi Chang…..to the point where he had an affair with her and was almost killed by Naomi's psychopath boyfriend Wayne Chow. This led to the formation of a new and shall we say…….taboo relationship between Darius, Noelle and Naomi today.

Are they really living the charmed life they portray to others; or are there cracks in the foundation of this interesting relationship?

 

Christopher Romero escaped the clutches of his controlling drug lord father in Columbia; coming to the United States to start a new life and hide from the cartel his father operates. He changed his name, got married and has a daughter all the while hoping that his family never finds him………

Recently discovering that he's been found; is there anywhere for him to hide or to get himself out of his father's web? What will he do to keep his wife and daughter out of harm's way?

 

These and many more stories will be found in the pages of all the volumes of Cape Heights; a contemporary romance saga where love triangles, family rivalries, intriguing stories and drama are the norm written in the classic style of our favorite daytime soap operas!

 

Warning: This book contains cursing, explicit sex scenes, drug use, alternative relationships and controversial storylines. This book series is not for the easily offended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michele Ceron
• Release date: Mar 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201082314

Book preview

Forward and Acknowledgements

Thank you so much for purchasing my very first e-book. I hope you enjoy reading it just as much as I enjoy writing it! Why did I write a daytime TV style soap opera? Seems like a weird choice of genre. I say it is a weird choice because firstly you really don’t see them in book form and secondly because soaps are not as popular as they were in previous decades. I remember as a child I was addicted to soaps. My mom watched them, so I watched them. Even though I may not have understood everything going on in them as a really young child, I was immediately hooked into the drama, the romantic entanglements, the suspense, the bounty of characters and all the different stories going on at one time. Once I got into my teen years, at that point I was watching not only the ABC soaps that my mom was watching, but also all the CBS ones too. I would flip back and forth between the two channels. I would record them on VHS when I was at school and during the summer I would spend many afternoons watching them instead of being outside.

During the summer of 1990 I was 13 years old and I came down with the chicken pox. While being stuck inside for about 3 weeks straight, I decided to write my own soap opera. As a child I already had a natural talent and interest in creative writing, this was my first major endeavor. I can no longer remember the name of my soap, but I created a town and about 30 or more characters. I don’t remember much about it anymore and I did not keep it (I wish I had) it was all hand written on notebook paper. I do remember though the name of the female villain was Violet and she was a blonde, lol. I really enjoyed writing that, even though I only did it for about a month then I gave up on it.

Flash forward to 2001-2002; I am now around 24 years old and I became addicted to the message board discussion groups online. I found ezboard which had so many different message boards on an array of topics. I was active in a couple of message boards discussing books and authors, particularly Anne Rice who is my favorite. One day, a guest came on the Anne Rice board I frequented and posted a link to their message board advertising that they were an online soap opera looking for writers. What? No way! I immediately checked it out and I could not believe what I found: a legit soap opera created by 3 women and there was about 4 or 5 women writing for the characters and putting them in scenes and stories were planned out. This was my dream, honestly. The online soap opera was called Crystal Beach, a fictional coastal town in California. Once I got the flow of it, I went from writing for 3 characters to an additional 3 or 4 more characters. Those of us who wrote for the soap who were not the creators were allowed to create new characters and submit them for approval. It wasn’t long before I created my first character: Miranda Covington, who was to be the cousin of a character who already existed, Mike Covington. I remember I created a character related to him because he was one of the few characters that did not have any family connections thus far. My character was approved and I really loved writing for a character that I created myself. Shortly after that, I created a man from Miranda’s past, Theo Jackson and with him I created a family of characters that was to be his brother, sister in law, niece and nephew. All of these characters became a part of the soap. We had a great time writing this soap, we all wrote really well with each other and it was my hobby, my source of entertainment. My creative juices were flowing non- stop.

It didn’t take long until I felt a strong urge to create my own online soap opera. While still writing for Crystal Beach, I started thinking about my own soap opera that I wanted to create. Up until that point on soaps on TV, the majority of the characters were Caucasian. There might be a few black or Latino characters, but it would be rare to have more than like 5 minority characters out of around 40 in a soap. And even at Crystal Beach, it was virtually all Caucasian characters, which was one of the reasons I brought the Jackson family to Crystal Beach, a black family. So when I started to think about my new soap, I also wanted a cast of characters that not only included many more black characters, but also Latino characters and Asian characters (which was virtually unheard of at that time). But not only that, I wanted there to be focus on other areas of occupation for the characters besides the typical two completing large companies run by two powerful families. With the assistance of some of the girls I wrote with at Crystal Beach, we came up with the idea of the location being in the Pacific Northwest and also to have a university be a major locale for some of the characters to work at but also many of the characters to attend school there. You really didn’t see that in soaps. The Young and The Restless back in the 90’s did for a little while have a focus on a core of characters who were college aged and attended the local university, but even in that instance, it was only a few characters and you never actually saw them on campus, just hanging out at the campus coffee house. And none of the characters worked there. So we created Coastal Cliffs University and had many of the scenes take place on campus with about a half dozen of the characters college age who attended there and another 3 or so characters who worked there.

It was around 2003 that Cape Heights was born. On my own, I first came up with the different families of Cape Heights. I started off thinking about what race I wanted the family to be, then I went through last names in my head until I came up with one that I liked the sound of. Once I had the last name, I started thinking up individual family members and first names for each of them. I came up with a general sense on if they were going to be a good character or an evil one or somewhere in between. Were the parents married or divorced? Was this a wealthy family or middle class? Then I tried to think of a basic storyline and personality as well as past story for each character and then finally came up with who is friends with who, who are enemies, and who are currently romantically involved and who were romantically involved in the past? Once I came up with these general traits for each character and family dynamic, then I either fleshed out each character’s bio and story with more details, or my co writers put their own spin or ideas into some of the characters. There were a couple of characters whom the other writers completely created on their own and I did not create at all. But the majority of the characters were either mostly my creation or completely my creation. Once we had all the characters fleshed out (which was around 50 characters) then we started to plot out major storylines. Some of the stories we already had an idea how they would go and how they would conclude. Other stories we had a start for but we were unsure in which direction we would eventually conclude it. An example of this was the story of Trisha Davis and Adrian Emerson. They were a very young couple and Trisha got pregnant but she didn’t want to keep the baby because she was an aspiring singer whose career was on the verge of catching her big break. But her boyfriend, Adrian, was completely against abortion. So I already had the beginning of the story mapped out: She accidentally gets pregnant, she heavily leans to get an abortion but knows her boyfriend would not want that so she does not tell him she is pregnant, unsure of what to do. But starting the soap, I had no idea which way I would conclude this story: would Trisha get the abortion and Adrian find out after the fact? Would she change her mind and keep the baby? Would Adrian find out she was going to get an abortion and stop her in time, or not stop her in time? Or would she miscarry the child? I was conflicted on which direction to go and I never got to finish out this story because we stopped writing it before myself and the other writers could come to a decision on which way to take this story as well as many of the other stories.

The planning and fleshing out of the soap took months before we finally started to actually write it. Then writing out scenes and such took a long time as well. We wrote for Cape Heights for about 2-3 years and you would think we got far in that time, we didn’t. The stories were still in their infancy stages and had not progressed terribly far in that time. We started writing less and less, mostly just because our lives being busy and getting in the way and over time that caused all of us to lose interest and for the creative juices to stop flowing. Sometime in 2006, we stopped writing for it all together. All my life I have done some kind of writing. I have written short stories, short plays, essays. All for my own enjoyment, I never got anything published. I took creative writing classes in high school and in college. But after Cape Heights ended, my writing juices stopped flowing for a very long time. I had no ideas or desire to do any writing again for 12 years. In the summer of 2018, I started thinking about Cape Heights again. I started thinking about the stories and the characters and I started missing it. I wanted to go back and re read all of it. I tried to find the message board that it was on, hoping that it was still there but knowing that most likely it would not be. And to my dismay, it was gone. I searched long and hard but Cape Heights did not exist anymore. Neither did Crystal Beach (we all still wrote for Crystal Beach as well while also writing for Cape Heights). That was disappointing. In the fall of 2018, I went to a psychic fair. I sat in on a group reading from a psychic. The guy looked straight at me and said to me You are an artist. What did you used to do creatively? Were you a painter? I said no. A musician? again I said no. He said Well whatever you used to do creatively, you need to go back to it. At first I thought he was completely wrong, because I hadn’t written in so many years, I almost forgot that I used to. Then it occurred to me and I said to him I used to write many years ago he said That is it, that is what you need to go back to.

An hour later, I got a private reading from a completely different psychic and this guy was not at the group reading so he did not get this from the other guy. He also told me during my reading that I need to get back to writing, though he specifically knew that I was a writer and he said You used to write, there is something you must write. You need to start writing it now. At first I thought he was talking about a business plan, because I do want to start my own business and I have been putting off writing a business plan. I said to him Yea I have been procrastinating on writing my business plan. He looked at me really puzzled. He then said Okay, I don’t feel like that is what you need to write, but maybe that is what I am getting, so write your business plan. I got the feeling from him that he was telling me to write creatively. But I put it out of my mind.

In early December 2018 about 5 weeks after my encounter with the two psychics who told me that I need to write again, I am lying in bed one night unable to sleep. Suddenly out of nowhere, I started thinking about Cape Heights. I started thinking about my favorite characters and then I started remembering some of the stories and then I started remembering the places in the town and everything came flooding back to me. After that I started thinking where would the characters be now? What if it were a few years later? How would some of those stories have concluded and where would those characters be now based on that? The ideas came to me at lightning speed. I came downstairs to my computer and I started jotting down ideas. I decided to write for Cape Heights again but pretend that it is 5 years later after where we last left off. I started jotting down which couples would still be together, which would be broken up. I wrote down their current ages, and I started coming up with back stories from the last 5 years. Then I just started to actually write scenes. When I started off, immediately I thought I need to bring Miranda from Crystal Beach to Cape Heights. She was the very first character I have ever created so she always held a special place in my heart. What would she be doing in Cape Heights? I immediately thought what she would be doing and I decided to make her the very first character in the very first scene. The last character she was romantically involved with in Crystal Beach was one of the 3 original characters that I wrote for, Carson Taggart; a wealthy entrepreneur who was in his mid-60’s. Even though I loved Carson dearly, if he were still alive I see no reason for Miranda to come to Cape Heights so I said that he died a few years before and Miranda inherited most of his estate which she used to come to Cape Heights to build her own hotel. So I knew I had to come up with a love interest from the Cape Heights characters for Miranda. Out of nowhere it hit me who I would pair her with. I am not going to give it away, but someone very unlikely based on her past and the past of that particular character. I honestly have no idea how it even came to me, it literally came out of the blue but was immediately intriguing and I thought yes, that somehow can make sense, let’s go for it!" But of course there has to be conflict so I decided to also bring her ex fiancée, Theo Jackson, to Cape Heights as well. From there everything just rapidly poured out of me with literally no effort. Ideas for all the characters were popping up out of nowhere it felt like and I just started writing non-stop. Initially I had no inkling to get this published; I was doing it for my own pleasure. I had a friend of mine read it and she was hooked on the stories. She gave me a few critiques as well which was helpful. It is now 4 months later and the creative flow still has not stopped. This has been such a gratifying experience for me. Even if hardly anyone buys this e-book and reads it, it is beyond satisfying to me to resuscitate these characters, create new ones, and breathe new life into their stories. I am having the best time doing it.

To wrap this up, I wanted to give acknowledgements to the people who solely created or helped to create some of these characters. The women who wrote Cape Heights with me (as well as Crystal Beach) are as following: Angela Clark, creator of Crystal Beach. She created the character of Mike Covington (who ended up following Miranda to Crystal Beach, against my will ☺ ). She also was the one who wrote for the character of Mike on Crystal Beach. I wanted to make sure I give her the credit. Jennifer Mahoney also wrote for Crystal Beach and then helped to create Cape Heights. She is the sole creator of the character of Aeryn Davis and I believe Ethan Scott. She wrote for the characters of Sarah Rutledge, Noelle Emerson, Lori Mitchell, Julian Rutledge, and a few other characters. Tina Schriver also wrote for Crystal Beach and helped me to create Cape Heights. She came up with the concept of a coastal town in Oregon and created most of the locations in Cape Heights. I believe she came up with the concept of having a university as a focal point. Some of the characters that she played were Helena Scott, Emily Rutledge, Rebecca Torres, and others. Melissa (whose last name I cannot remember) was co-creator of Crystal Beach and also wrote for several characters at Cape Heights. She wrote for characters such as Bradley Rutledge, Wayne Chow, and Naomi Chang. Another writer named Gabby (again I don’t remember her last name) wrote for some of the characters such as Gabriella Alvarez, Chelsea Rutledge, Anita Torres, and others. I wanted to make sure I acknowledge each of these ladies who contributed a lot to the creation and stories of Cape Heights and who brought the characters to life.  The main characters that I wrote for previously are Miranda Covington, Pilar Alvarez, Darius Hilton, Malik Emerson, Elliot Mitchell, Trisha Davis, Theo Jackson, Daniel Rutledge and John Chow. All of us would also temporarily fill in to write for other characters who lost their writer or never had one.

I also want to acknowledge my friend, Jocelyn Levy, who was the first person to read my recreation of Cape Heights and who gave me her feedback and encouraged me to self-publish it in an e-book. Thank you, Jocelyn. You are such a great friend! Also a thank you to my father, John West, who first gave me the idea to self-publish in an e-book. To any of my friends and family who may purchase this e-book, if there is a character that has the same first name as you, I am sorry but I did not name that character after you. Some of the names that I used are my favorite names that I have always liked, but the characters that may have the same name as you, it is just a coincidence. I picked out first names based on what sounded good with a last name that I already came up with and also what name seemed to fit the personality of the character I may have already had in mind. No, the character of Daniel Rutledge was not named after my husband, Daniel. I created that character a good 9 years before I met my husband, lol. And while I am at it, a shout out to my husband, Daniel Ceron ☺.

In conclusion, I enjoy writing in the soap opera genre. I think the reason is; is because there are so many stories to write for at once, not just a singular plot with only a few main characters. This keeps it more interesting creatively for me.  There are dozens of main characters and multiple stories, some of which overlap each other. It is like composing a symphony, all different instruments playing different notes but coming together in a beautiful melody. Though there will be many of the standard soap opera elements (love triangles galore, evil doers, tragedies, etc) I will try to avoid some of the over the top standards (like resurrecting people from the dead. Once I kill someone, that is it, they are dead dead). I try to keep the stories a