cool and unusual punishment

how can i miss you if i never met you?

I found the above song a few weeks ago (People Like Us for those of you who can't see it for whatever reason) and was instantly overcome by a wave of violent nostalgia. While the song is certainly cheesy it was my favorite song for well over a year and a half, between the summer of sixth grade and seventh grade to around the time I wrote The Cities Have Fallen. 

It was, if nothing else, a time of tremendous change for me. In the dead of that summer, I was making new friends, new worlds, and I'd recently begun roleplaying Warriors on this app called "Clash of Clans". I was going to camp with the girl who I had no idea at the time would become the love of my young life, and I relayed to her the stories of a childhood I'd dramatized into fantasy and a world I made that interwove an intricate tapestry with our own, a world I'd created perhaps as an escape but also as a kind of crutch with which to deal with a reality that was largely uninterested with me.

At the same time, I began two projects. One was a short story called "Renegades", which was taken from a much larger Dreamland canon and centered around Dark Rainbow and Torch's first meeting out of the Factory. The other was a nuzlocke, which I had become obsessed with at the time. I would write the latter for hours on end, and finished it in a twelve-hour sprint.

The former became three chapters of the much longer Double Rainbow, my first NaNoWriMo. The latter became the first draft of Hearts of Gold.

The set of circumstances that led to the creation of both books were inevitable, but it's little more than coincidence that bought me here. If my friends in seventh grade (both my real life friends and several people on Clash) hadn't goaded me into acquiring a Wattpad, I severely doubt I ever would have ended up on the site.

Regardless, those days and those people are long gone, save for aforementioned friend I attended camp with (my ocean and my heart). I left Clash months ago in the middle of one of the most painful periods of my life, when I legitimately couldn't bring myself to write or socialize with anyone. I slipped out of relationships, responsibilities, and couldn't figure out why I was still around some days. My life wasn't hard, nor were people particularly cruel to me, so I can't profess to have been utterly tortured, but I felt, profoundly, like I didn't deserve the life I had and didn't have anyone to turn to to talk about it (or that I had 'talked out' and burdened my friends enough). Life felt like one long, endless tunnel that I was traversing out of duty, heading for a light I'd never reach without anyone or anything to guide me.

That was when I started Roses and Thorns, and well, I got better. Just as Double Rainbow helped me fully realize my destiny (or at least as close to destiny as you can have in this world) as a writer, Roses and Thorns made me remember that not only did I love life, I love writing and I love the people around me. It was an intensely personal journey and after writing Rose Eudica, who came up from the depths of grief to change not only her town but to revolutionize her own life, I swore to myself that I would have to do better.

To say that writing is a passion of mine is an understatement. These stories and these worlds have shaped the way I think and have defined entire years of my life. I pour myself into them and in return, echoing back from the depths of time, I see imprints of myself in every page, whether they be the stories of the young girl intensely passionate about her first story, the developing novelist who needed an outlet, the struggling freshman trying to adapt to high school while juggling several stories, or the haunting ghost of the girl just months ago who wanted to feel and belong somewhere again. 

So it's strange to be reaching the end of any project. I write little in December, if only because my NaNo for the year is still fresh on my mind. I took a month's break after I finished Broken Souls, the last story of the Hearts of Gold trilogy, which was one of my biggest literary undertakings to date. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm no longer working on certain projects or feel a little lost without some of my characters, knowing that their story is well and truly finished. Knowing that I'm ready to move on from a project for good is a hard decision, especially because some of them could use the edits, but for now it's definitely for the best. 

._. I miss my kids though.

***

Well, while I'm here- this out-of-state regatta requires some in-house packing and I kind of need to get on that, so there won't be a chapter tonight. I had to study for AP Gov the night prior, hence why I didn't have this queued up... all and all this is just a crazy week. Possibly the very worst week for my updates. I want to write on the bus to said regatta but knowing me and knowing crew the likelihood of that happening is slim. I plan to keep on the current update schedule, so if I miss anything, the chapter that should be updating takes priority (read: I'll be updating WTRB before anything else if I don't write over the regatta and get home Saturday), but I will write "compensation chapters" of TSBS and Deja Vu if I can't get around to them. 

Salutations!