Welcome to Gaia! ::

I decided on the title ("A Rose by Any Other Name...") and changed the blurb a bit...here's a slightly more in-depth summary of what happens. The first line is just sort of a "thought" that goes along with the story, the rest is what the story is about. I'll explain more in my next post.

Can you love someone too much? Or is too much never enough?

Matt Cooper and Seiko Sakura are from two completely different worlds. Eighteen-year-old Matt was raised in a wealthy household in one of Washington D.C.’s richest districts with his cold, demanding father, his loving but sometimes overly-involved mother, and his quiet, intellectual sister Lily, and wishes he could be free from his family’s expectations of him so that he could stop trying so hard to please his father and pursue his real passion in life, which is music. Seventeen-year-old Seiko, meanwhile, lost her mother in a car crash when she was six, and was shortly thereafter abandoned by her father and put into the unforgiving foster care system, along with her younger brother Kenji. She has fought for eleven years to keep her brother with her, and the two are fiercely loyal to each other, more attached to one another than to anyone else. They live with a woman named Daryl in a middle-class district of Washington D.C., and Daryl loves Seiko and Kenji as if they were her own children. After years of struggle, things finally seem to be looking up for Seiko and Kenji.

Seiko and Matt meet when they both take a course at the nearby community college in Shakespeare over the summer, and while neither is sure how to react to the other at first, they soon get to know each other and fall in love. But it won’t be easy for them--Matt’s parents, upon meeting Seiko, judge her based on her Asian ethnicity and her background to be not good enough for their son, and Kenji begins worrying that Seiko will run away with Matt and leave him behind. When Matt takes a step into Seiko’s world, he sees a completely different way of life than the one he’s used to seeing. He learns about what living with no family is really like, and he begins to question everything he thought he knew about his family, his life, and himself. Seiko, on the other hand, realizes that money and family aren’t the only ingredients to a happy life--she feels much happier with her life without either of those things than Matt seems to be with both.

As Matt and Seiko grow closer and closer, it becomes quickly apparent that things are going to change--Daryl’s lung cancer, which has been in remission for years, resurfaces violently, and it becomes doubtful that Seiko and Kenji will be together much longer. Matt catches his father in the arms of another woman, and is terribly confused on what to do with this secret. Kenji begins using drugs, and Seiko worries about this, as well as her own uncertain financial future. And Kenji, desperate not to lose the only family he has, makes a drastic decision--one that could either save his closeness with his sister, or cause him to lose her forever.

This sounds really interesting, and I'd love to read what you have when you start writing it. I hope you post it in the guild.
That said, I wouldn't mind helping on the sidelines, with encouragement and feedback. This is a very interesting and well thought out plot, even though I know there's more you know that I don't heh.