Firecracker: The 99th Games Book One

Afterword

Wow.

What a project, what a journey, what a mess! I feel like I've been working on this story for ages. I had the ending in mind since I first thought of the idea, and now that it's finally here and it's time to start on the second book (the conclusion to this AU), I'm almost a little overwhelmed.

To be honest, if I said this project was a labor of love, I'd be exaggerating a bit. It's a labor of desperation, perhaps, but it quickly became a labor of love. At the time I started this project, all of my usual writing partners had their own individual projects that they were working on that made them unavailable for the collaborations. I was going through a bit of a creative crisis, unable to write anything because all the characters I was currently obsessed with belonged to joint universes that weren't being written. I couldn't very well ask my friends to drop their projects just to entertain me, so where did that leave me?

Well, it left me here: scrambling for ideas, inventing my own twist on an existing universe as I'd done a thousand times before with these same characters, and stealing kids and arc ideas from those same friends I could no longer rely on for my escapism. And the more I wrote, the more only one or sometimes two people read it, the worse I started to feel, admittedly. I was putting so much effort into all of this, and all for the sake of a couple pairs of eyes at most. I decided to make this my return to Wattpad because I wanted the world to meet these characters I had poured my whole heart into and see how much I'd grown, but to be perfectly frank, it was also because I was being selfish. I needed validation, needed to know people out there still cared about my work. Maybe I was afraid I'd been forgotten when I got increasingly obnoxious and desperate for comments, or maybe I just missed all the friends I left behind when I stopped religiously checking Wattpad and we lost the forums.

Regardless of the reason, now that it's all over...I can't deny the sense of accomplishment I feel.

Firecracker is by far the longest project I've ever written. Over 150k words, over 300 pages, and three entire Google Doc documents went into this mess. I have more than 70 chapters worth of content, some of which is unfinished art galleries, but still! Considering my previous longest work (seVen: Vice and Virtue) clocks in under 100k words and somewhere around 45 chapters, this was a monumental achievement for me. Despite feeling discouraged during dry spells where no one was commenting, despite feeling disappointed that I wasn't getting as many reads and votes on Firecracker as I have on other works of mine that I feel are less worthy...I was determined to stick it out and actually complete a project for once, and I am equally determined to power through and finish the sequel before returning to my other works.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, a million different ways, to those of you who supported me and interacted on Firecracker in its early days. You've all been instrumental in helping me stay on task. I feel like towards the end, I was finally able to write this book for me, and that's only because y'all wouldn't let me give up when I felt like it. I know this isn't the perfect story, there's plot holes galore, I never updated all the chapters to match their edited versions in the Google Docs where I write this, but some people out there gave it a chance and I can never repay you for that.

A special thank you to @MyDamination and @TwizzieLord for letting me steal your kids and giving me advice on how to use them. I would die for Fuyuko and Uriel they are my favorites.

I'd love to continue hearing from you, any comments, questions, or suggestions you may have as our cast moves towards their next big challenge and I move into mine! This has been such a daunting task, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've learned a lot about writing, myself, and my kids through this whole endeavor. Keep your eyes on my feed for news on the sequel or any big edits I may have to make in this book in the future! Thank you again for everything, and I'll see you in book two: Sparks!

All my love,

Kimmy Grace