I know it’s been a long time! I haven’t actually gone anywhere, but I also didn’t really know where to tell people what I’ve been up to. And then I remembered the existence of this blog! 😂 This is actually the perfect place for me to leave this note, so that’s what I’m doing.
So, even though the last prose fanfic I wrote was apparently back in 2012, I was working on fanfic for most of 2013 and 2014 in the form of Freaky Gone Fabulous, a Monster High comic. I really, really love that story. I love how the comic panels look, I love what part of the story I’ve already told, I love the scripts I’ve already written. I absolutely do not want to leave it abandoned. I want so badly to go back to it.
But a bunch of junk in my life really just conspired against me. I developed a seizure disorder, and sudden chronic pain that made doing things like bending over the tables I had the dolls set up on to photograph them really painful. I also had been using the woods behind my house as scenery for a lot of the panels, and then the woods were sold to a developer who turned it into a housing development, and that sucked and stressed me out, which exacerbated the health problems, and yadda yadda.
Anyway, that’s really not the only issue with continuing both the webcomic and with, you know, ever finishing “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon.” Because I had the bright idea of writing a book, and that book wound up getting published, and suddenly it’s been, like, what? Six-and-a-half years? And I’ve got two pen names and writing books has eaten all my time. I think if I wasn’t sick I could manage to juggle both, but trying to manage both writing novels and writing fanfic/taking pics and doing the Photoshopping for the web comic while simultaneously being chronically ill has just proven to not be doable. I can’t even write more than one freaking book in a year if I’m lucky.
(Part of me wants to tell you about my books, and part of me feels weird about connecting my fandom identity with my… “professional”…? identity. I mean, I haven’t exactly been secretive about the fact that I’m into fandom. It probably wouldn’t be hard to figure out if you knew what to look for. But I just feel like I’m doxxing myself. Maybe someday I’ll just go for it, though. My first book was based on Atlantis and the second one has a couple that absorbed all the feels from my ZoiMina fics, so it does have some crossover appeal here. 😂)
Last summer after I finished a novel, I thought I would take a break and finish “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon.” It only had four chapters left according to my outline—that wouldn’t take that long, right? I mean, it’s a fanfic. I figured it was probably like a third of the length of one of my novels, that would be easy. I could whip those four chapters out in a couple weeks and be done with it.
Then I managed to get the whole fanfic together (good God, I wrote fanfics in separate documents for each chapter, what in the actual) and looked at the word count and then started sobbing because it already was longer than every single one of the books that I’ve written on my romance pen name and it’s not even done!
(I write longer books on my SFF pen name, but come on, this is a freaking fanfic, it shouldn’t be 300+ bound pages wtf.)
(And it’s only eight chapters long! How can I possibly have spread 50,000+ words over eight freaking chapters??)
Anyway, I was plunged into such despair that I didn’t even reread it. But I will someday. I really, really don’t want to leave these unfinished fics out there. I may not wind up writing any more once I get Guardians and FGF finished, but I at least want to end my fic career with no unfinished fics.
And probably then I’ll tell you all my pen name(s) and you can look for all the PGSM and Atlantis references in my books. There are a lot.
