I always re-read my previous chapters before I start a new one, so I’m not really sure how this happened…

In chapter 5 of GotE&M, I had Nephrite tell Ami not to tell anyone that they were looking for the stuff about the feud. This is because originally, they were going to find all that stuff on their own. Why? Because I started writing this thing in 2004 when I was 18-19 and what do you mean there are other characters in this series who should be included?? Back in those days, I wrote romance and if it didn’t have to do with the romance, then why even bother with it? That’s why Rei and Makoto were like… barely in it. That’s also why, in the original outline of the story, Luna and Artemis were not going to be in the story. At all. I couldn’t figure out how to include them, and as far as I was concerned, they weren’t necessary.

Fast-forward to 2010, I’m still working on this thing and I’ve reached the point where I’m out of the material from 2004. I had written like 5 pages of chapter 6 back in 2004 and I stopped because I was really stumped and didn’t like where it was going. There’s a good reason for this: it was crap. It just took 6 years of maturing as a writer and as a person for me to figure that out. I’d been stuck at a road block on that chapter, and when I finally got past that, the chapter went in a really different direction than what I would have written in 2004.

Nowadays, I still like romance, but in moderation–I’m not going to be writing a story that’s just like “I LUFF U, LET’S MAKE OUT” anymore (I’ll leave that to Stephenie Meyer). Thus, GotE&M isn’t just the story of Nephrite and Ami’s twu twu wuv (and later down the line, Zoisite and Minako’s… spoiler? XD) anymore… I want it to be the full story of what happened in the Silver Millennium, one that can explain how everything that happened in PGSM came to be. Yes, Ami’s relationship with Nephrite (and Kunzite) has a lot to do with it, and I hope that when you see more of Zoisite and Minako’s relationship, you might understand why they act the way they do in PGSM. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I think it’s important to see how Serenity transformed from the sweet girl we see in the PGSM flashbacks (and the one we’ve seen in GotE&M so far) into the tough bitch Princess Sailor Moon was. We need to understand how Luna and Artemis figure into this, and how they become who they were in PGSM. And we need to understand the relationship between the Silver Crystal, Metallia, and Serenity/Usagi. These are all things that I want to cover in GotE&M. So the story has evolved, and this is just part of the reason chapter 6 had to change.

I also realized that it just didn’t make sense for Ami to be the only character driving the story just because “I liked her best” back in 2004 (P.S. funnily enough, she’s not my favorite character anymore, so now I look back on my old stuff and think, “Why did I use her so much?!”). And there are other things that matter in Ami’s life besides her ~luv~ for Nephrite, other people who are just as important. After getting older, having real relationships and seeing other girls doing so as well made me realize that your boyfriend is not, and shouldn’t be, your life. Ami has a great group of friends in the Senshi, and that needs to be a factor in stories about her. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense for Ami to want to include Makoto, her closest friend after Usagi, in the search. So that’s what I did.

I’m personally very happy with the way it went, but it does create a plot hole between chapters 5 and 6. This really is the downside of fanfiction as opposed to writing, for example, a novel that no one but your editor sees until it’s finished– with fanfiction, it’s “publish as you go.” This is why on most of my newer fanfics, I have been waiting to upload until it’s completely finished, so if I have to make revisions, I can without creating problems. But in GotE&M’s case, it’s too late for that.

So the question now is, “Just leave it? Or revise chapter 5?” I’m planning on going for the revision (I have typos I want to fix, anyway). But for those of you who have already read it… sorry for the plot holes. XD