Behind the Dawn

Announcement (1/4/2022)

I've been holding off on doing this for the longest time because I've kept going back and forth on the issue in my head. But I think it's time.

As of today, January 4th 2022, this book will no longer be active.

There are multiple reasons why I'm doing this:

-Pretty much all of my friends who had any interest in this book/my life are gone or have moved on to different websites.
-A random book felt appropriate when I was a late teenager with trivial things to spout about. Now I'm a young adult wrestling with a planet of responsibility on my shoulders, not to mention my numerous mental health problems. (Not that life didn't suck or that I wasn't also needing to be an adult before my time back then. It just felt... Hell, I don't want to say "more manageable" because that gives the wrong impression, but also. It really was.)
-I no longer have the mental energy, inspiration, fortitude, whatever word you wanna use. I'm struggling to get on my feet every morning as it is.
-This is a thing:

Which, incidentally, brings me to my next point.

I have begun the process of migrating all of my works to my AO3. This was partially prompted by the event above (though I highly doubt, for example, someone would take an extremely niche Pokemon fic of mine and try to build a show off of it. There are too many copyright issues to even begin to approach). But I'm also using AO3 much more anyway when I do have the energy to write something. It's seen as the prime site for fandom content now with the intense commercialization and stripping away of sites like... well, Wattpad. Not to mention the creative/artistic freedom AO3 allows, and it being an aggressive "by writers, for writers" haven. It just makes sense to base my operations there from now on.

It is likely that once I finish moving all my one-shots and shorter works that they will be removed from this website. This is your warning, if you can not access my AO3 for whatever reason, to download and save whatever you can if you care enough before they go down, probably by the end of the month. This includes my random books. This may (or may not) include my bigger works, such as She Who Treads, TVSF, and the incomplete Mystery Dungeon Novelization. I still haven't decided what to do with those yet, to be honest. To this day I still get a trickle of notes for TVSF, which is honestly shocking to me as I consider it my weakest/most juvenile work. But if TVSF and She Who Treads is still garnering attention here, then I think it would be cruel to take them down. Those will likely be the only remanents left of my account once everything is said and done. (Temporal Dusk probably will be taken down though: I get absolutely no reads or comments for it on here. Which is a pity considering how much work I put into it...)

That said, the migration process is long, so it may be a couple of months before we reach that point. I will most likely post an announcement at some point to update you on the more uncertain decisions, so stay tuned if you're interested. Also, feel free to PM me if you want to stay in touch somehow: my best options right now are Discord and Tumblr.

I wish I could close on a happy note. I wish I could say that my life had gotten better since 2018, or the last time I consistently posted in this book. But, as I've always suspected and feared, my life continues its downwards spiral descent into hell. At this point, I'm convinced I will never know peace or happiness. I am no longer a student, and I have absolutely zero plans, direction, or control over the trajectory of my life (despite trying to do everything right), and I'm still struggling with the loss of a huge part of my identity. The future looks bleaker than ever, both at home and outside my front door (re: the eternal pandemic and global society continuing to explode every three days).

I'm sorry I couldn't be around more. I'm sorry I couldn't come back with some inspirational story of hope. I'm sorry I couldn't be the role model some of you saw me as.

But this is real life, not a fairy tale. More often than not, there are no happy endings. And that's just the way it is.

This is Rosa950, signing off for the final time.

~Rosa950