I have a reputation for telling darker, more serious stories—and yes, a lot of my work is bleak. But I also have a lighter side. Whether I’m playing a heightened version of myself in the Manic Expression animated movie or just shooting the shit with fellow Expressionists on a podcast, I know how to keep things fun.
Faded: A Manic Expression Story is a romantic comedy — one of three that live in the Manic Expression universe. While the other two lean into the male perspective, this one belongs entirely to Gabby Vasquez: a reluctant Hollywood screenwriter who’s been cashing big checks for mindless blockbusters while quietly longing to write something that actually matters.
If you’ve been following the releases so far, Faded will feel like a deliberate left turn. That’s the beauty of this universe—there really is something for everyone. Life is never just one genre. Bloodshot was a dark surreal thriller. The Last Spike was a gritty historical drama. Next to those, Faded might look like fluff… but trust me, there’s more weight to this one than it first appears.
What Faded is about: Ten years after escaping Lakewood High, Gabby Vasquez returns for her high school reunion as the most successful graduate of the Class of 1998 — at least on paper. She’s rich, respected, and completely hollow. The only reason she came home is to find the boy who once inspired her: Matt Stamper, her high-school best friend and the brilliant writer she always believed would change the world.
Instead she finds a broke single father washing dishes, cut off from everyone who once believed in him. Gabby offers him a lifeline — a place to live, time to write, and a shot at the dreams they both abandoned. As the two finally chase the future they once imagined, they discover their connection was never just friendship.
The long, strange road to this release: Faded started life as a screenplay that I wrote my senior year of high school. I had fallen in love for the first time, and I had fallen hard. She was my best friend at the time, and though the attraction was mutual things just didn’t work out. The timing was off for us, so I wrote a story where I projected myself a decade into the future, when the graduating class of 1998 would all regroup at Lakewood High School for our reunion. Funnily enough, no such reunion actually took place in 2008.
What did happen in 2008 was the first release of Manic Expression: A Collection. Faded became one of the stories from that original release, written now not by a teenager imagining adulthood, but by an adult deeply disappointed by how life turned out. This new version of Faded was a bit of wish fulfillment for me, giving a happy ending to a high school romance that, if I’m honest, I had not fully recovered from yet.
Of course, by the time I was Gabby and Matt’s age, I had a child in tow, something absent from my original vision of the story. At seventeen I had envisioned Matt as someone who never quite reached his potential. Revisiting the story in my late twenties, he became a single father, crushed under the weight of his responsibilities. Gabby wasn’t just taking on a romance here, she was taking on the prospect of becoming a mother.
Faded is also a story about artistic integrity, and what “selling out” actually looks like for an artist. Gabby writes dumb action movies because the pay is good. She feels like a fraud, one selling the public the poison of mediocrity. But Gabby’s sin isn’t writing blockbusters, its writing work she doesn’t actually believe in. Personally, I love a good brainless action movie, but you can always tell the ones that were made with love and the ones that were made for a quick buck.
Thirty years after I first dreamed it up in my childhood bedroom, Faded remains one of my favorite stories. It’s about reaching out a hand to someone in need, and how that single generous act can end up changing not only their life but yours in the best possible ways.
Grab your copy today!
Let me know when you start reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts — and especially how your own first love shaped the person you became.
See you next week for something truly weird!
James Daniel Walsh
About Author
