Wayfarer [Bill Cipher x Reader] [REVISED]

BONUS: Fun Facts

A/N: Because a lot of you asked for it last chapter, here is a fun facts section! Enjoy :)

Wayfarer has the honor of being both my first long-form (i.e. novel-length) writing project and the first fanfiction I've ever written. Prior to this, I'd only ever written original short stories.

Originally, the name for this fic was Wanderlust. However, I saw another Bill x Reader fanfic with that name, so I scrapped the idea and looked for other travel-related nouns starting with W to use as the title instead. That's how this fic got its current name.

The first scene I ever wrote for Wayfarer involved Bill and the reader discussing Doritos, with Bill asserting that Doritos were made from the corn at the bottom of the barrel. This was because someone once told me this. I couldn't find any sources backing up this claim, though, so I never put the scene in any version of the fic.

During the first few weeks of this story being up in late 2018 and early 2019, there were such few reads that I got incredibly discouraged and considered giving up. While it wasn't fun to live through, it really made me appreciate every bit of attention I received later on.

I used this fic to reveal to an IRL friend that I wrote fanfiction. As far as I know, she's the only person I know IRL who has read this (and I hope it stays that way).

The experience of working on this fic inspired me to pursue my current college major: creative writing! Working on it was one of the few things that gave me joy in an emotionally turbulent part of my life, and that joy inspired me to make writing my life's work.

I replaced the original cover of this fic with the current one partway through the first draft because I thought it didn't pop out enough. Both covers were made by me on Canva using free stock photos from Pexels.

Between the first draft of the story that I posted here and the current draft, there was an entire second draft that no one but my beta reader and I saw.

To get into the right headspace to write the second draft of Wayfarer, I made an aesthetic board for it on Pinterest. If you guys want, I can make it public and share it with you.

I chose to have someone outside the fandom be my beta reader so they could judge the story purely based on craft and narrative. This led to a very awkward incident where they left a comment on the second draft essentially saying, "I looked up pictures of Bill Cipher online to see how his appearance matched up to your descriptions, but for some reason, all I got were pictures of weird yellow triangles? Please send me a reference picture so I know what I'm looking at." I didn't have the heart to tell them the truth. 😭

The first draft of this story was roughly 90,000 words, the second draft was around 85,000 words, and the third and current draft is around 78,000 words. Given the overlap in certain scenes between the drafts, I believe that means that I've written over 150,000 words for Wayfarer as a whole. That's a lot!

In total, I've spent over three and a half years of my life working on this fic. That's almost as long as the average American's time in high school!

A/N: Now that the fun facts section has been published, I'm going to do another Author Q & A! I feel like I didn't give you guys enough time to think of questions last time, so this time, I'm giving you until 5 pm CST on Sunday, July 4th, to submit your questions. Comment here to let me know what you've been wondering about, and I will try to answer!