Toddler - [TAEBIN FF]

Author's Note

Hi everyone 🥹

It's like 5am, Farewell Neverland is playing, so I'm in emo mode right now *clears throat*

After ten long months, Toddler officially reaches its end today on Wattpad here. Fun fact: I started this book on Taehyun's birthday, republished it on my birthday, finished it on Google Docs on August 20th (Juhyeok's birthday), and purposefully went back to my weekly upload schedule to finish it right on Soobin's birthday. Genius brain me thinks.

Anyways. 

This has been the craziest and most eventful writing journey yet. I... honestly, where do I even begin?

The majority of you guys have been reading this story since around July, I would estimate, but some of you guys have been here since the beginning, and you have seen every single change that happened to this little story. And like me, you've been a spectator to its entire ten-month-long journey.

Toddler is a reimagination of one of my old drafts. When I first picked it up, desperately wanting to publish a Taebin fanfic because of how little Taebin stories there are on Wattpad, I was so excited. I had been struggling with author's block for months with no end until that point, and so many new ideas were pouring in as I spent my entire winter break rewriting my old draft, changing certain scenes, writing new scenes, and being so incredibly excited to upload new chapters. My confidence was soaring.

Until March.

Suddenly, I began feeling extremely doubtful about this book. I started having thoughts such as "am I making this too complicated for people to understand" "why does my writing sound so weird" "bruh why can I no longer embody emotions well", and so on and so on. I began having anxiety regularly while thinking about this book, and as much as I hated to do this, I put Toddler on hiatus around mid-March.

That period from March to June was... tough, not gonna lie.

I almost deleted everything from the original draft, wanting to start on a completely clean slate. But that backfired on me so badly, and thank the lord I use Google Docs to write my fanfics, so recovering my file was possible.

To be quite frank, Toddler didn't exactly go through many changes. The story was always the same, but what I did do was add a couple more sub-plots, like Juhyeok's kindergarten story, as I thought it would be a reasonable explanation to Taehyun's behavior in the first half of the book, I removed a few unnecessary plot twists that I found unfitting to the whole character development process, the car accident was originally not supposed to happen but then it did, cuz, you know, I apparently love traumatizing my characters, and the playlist went through many changes to.

Speaking of the playlist, I think this also gave me a lot of trouble. Music often helps me get in the right mood of a certain scene, and even though I thought the songs were a perfect fit, that was not the case sometimes while writing and then reading it. However, every time I listen to it, I think to myself: huh, it ain't so bad.

To make a long story short, for three long months, I was in a sour mood every time I would work on this story. I can't even count the amount of times I felt like giving up, to discontinue this story because of how fckn unsatsified and angry I was with it and myself for not being able to write a good story. Ever since 2020 especially I've been priding myself in my writing and storytelling, but all of that changed in like mid-September 2022. Maybe it had to do with the fact I swapped from the German school system back to an English-speaking system and I felt like a loser with my English compared to everyone else, as they could write more formally and sophisticatedly than me in their essays. It sounds narcissistic of me to say so but I was admittedly accustomed to being the best English speaker and writer in my class for three years, so when that wasn't exactly the case anymore, my confidence plummeted regarding my writing.