RISK & REWARD ✔️

fin; a love letter to risk & reward

Woah. Hi! This is the end of Risk & Reward. Crazy for you to read, maybe. Absolutely insane for me to write. TLDR for the following; my sappy reflection and fond goodbye to this story. Includes some future plans. You should read it.

For the sake of this letter, please close your eyes and imagine it's 2022. You, for shits and giggles, started posting smutty oneshots of your own characters on Wattpad and for some reason they do really, really well. So you've got these silly oneshots, right (which, by the way, you started posting as a joke because you saw all of those absolutely horrible smut story "teasers" people post on TikTok and knew damn well you could do it better) and someone asks you in the comments if you've got any full-length smut books.

You don't. You haven't even really considered having one before, but now this comment has you thinking. Hey, you liked writing your oneshots but posted them as a joke, and people liked them. Hypothetically, right, what if you did the same thing with an actual book? What if you made a parody of those absolutely dogshit mafia man x innocent wife Wattpad classics? Also, what if it's gay?

So that's what happened here. Risk & Reward made its official public debut on October 31, 2022. I wrote a handful of chapters, posted them, and honestly kind of figured that's where it would end. I was quite literally raised on this platform. I read and wrote shit on my old account here, and I knew how bad it felt to see no interest in a story. I assumed I'd burn out in a week or two and probably take down my spontaneous start of a project shortly afterward. I liked the idea of it and I liked the characters, but I wasn't going to leave a story up that nobody saw. I was expecting to take Risk & Reward down after a matter of weeks - except that didn't happen, because people actually read it and people actually liked it.

I'm being so painfully honest when I say that literally receiving a single comment gave me the push to write the next chapter - in my head, there was actually someone who wanted to see what I was up to. That's never happened to me, at least in the sense of a stranger's interest being piqued by my work. The same cycle repeated for the next chapter - and then the next, and then the next. "Flying by the seat of my pants" or whatever the saying is really encapsulates how I felt throughout the time I was getting started on this story. I had no solid plot, just things I wanted to write, a character I liked, and a handful of people who seemed curious about what was going on. Ultimately, I decided to just have fun with the story for as long as I could, still thinking I'd eventually lose the interest of my little room of readers I'd caught. At some point, probably around the sixty chapter mark, I started to feel instead like I really had to take this one all the way to the end - and now here we are, fifty chapters later, at the end.

I wrote this as someone who thrived on the attention of her audience. Looking back on it through the perspective of a writer, I don't exactly love it, mainly because it's so loosely strung together in places. You can tell where I have somewhat solid ground in pieces of a plot and where I really start to lose my footing trying to get from one idea to the next. It's messy and sloppy - whenever I flip through here I have to avoid some chapters because I don't know why they even exist.

Then I look at this story through the perspective of who I was when I started it. Sappy lore: I started this story two years ago as a student at a Catholic high school. I was quiet, criminally shy, had maybe two friends, and though I knew I wasn't straight I wasn't at all open about it. My friends didn't know, my family didn't know. Actually, only one person knew, and it was someone I knew online. That was it, and it didn't help that nobody around me was really outwardly gay. Risk & Reward was, as silly as it sounds, a way for me to dip my toes into what it meant to be a girl who likes girls. It was a way for me to explore the fact that I thought girls were pretty in a different way than everyone around me did. Throughout this story, Slade became the object of me working out my own thoughts and feelings for the first time, ever. I was alone in that I had nobody to relate to, find interest in romantically, et cetera, and this story became an outlet for me to see what liking girls was like.