UPDATED 10/18/2016

Hello! As always, please just call me Clementine or Clem. Remember me?

Needless to say, it's been years since I've been active on FanFiction.net or really thought about ye olde fics that I still have left up on this account. I receive the odd email now and again as I get a review or a favourite story-- which always startles me, for reasons what may become apparent further into this update-- but I never had the time or energy to look in to what I had up on here or to reread anything I had written so long ago. (Like, very long. I was 14-16 when I did most of the writing on here!)

And I do mean so long. I am out of college with my bachelor's degree now, five years in the making, and I've got a lot of time on my hands now. Being free from the burden of writing an essay or two every week and being absolutely drained by a very demanding school schedule, I've decided I'm going to try and reapply myself to fanfiction writing. I wrote a thesis (on fandom and cosplay, in fact), so I feel with the right application of fortitude and force of will and dedication, I could for once finish multi-chapter fics.

This brings me to the fics I have here. I am still part of the fandoms of the stories I have posted here, though my participation in fandom online for the different fandoms swells and recedes depending on the energy I have, what idea has caught my attention, what character I'm currently fascinated by. I will be frank: I am an autistic adult, and I have been struggling with mental illness since elementary school. College was very difficult for me and exacerbated a lot of problems with my anxiety and depression. I stepped back from writing and posting because I did not need another stressor. This was difficult, considering how much I loved writing. However, I just did not have the brain energy to split between academic writing and fandom writing. Trying to do so went very badly for me.

In fact, I was so stressed by two of my stories, Shadow Magic and Descendants of Darkness, that I took them down early into college. Ironically, this same action was also driven by a sudden onslaught of energy and excitement for my old fics, which I felt I could write with much better quality and with much more thorough and complex attention to character and plot and world building. It was, unfortunately, my last burst of creative optimism for years. While I quickly found myself swamped by academics and mental health struggles and did not complete this goal beyond taking the stories down, it was also something I needed to do for my own mental well-being. I did not need another point of anxiety or detriment to my limited self-esteem. I know a lot of people enjoyed these fics, and that people felt they were good quality and fun, but I could not feel this, and I needed to take back some breathing room for myself.

I apologize to all the people who really loved these fics and went back to reread, only to find them replaced by an enthusiastic unfulfilled promise and were thus disappointed. Part of my return to FF has been nostalgia driving me to find old fics that I also loved and which shaped my own interest. Some were gone. Some I simply cannot find. It's disappointing, and frustrating. I recognize now that what was good for me was often very sad or disappointing for you all. However, I am not apologizing for taking them down when I needed to. I have a duty to taking care of myself, and was learning how to do that, and am still learning how to do that. I am a person before I am an author.

In good news, I still have those old fossils on file. They have been picked over through the years whenever inspiration or renewed love hit me, grammatical corrections made or additions added to deepen what was already there. I've decided to re-post the chapters that are missing from the original fics, and perhaps what more I had written that was never posted. This will possibly take a few days of rereading a final time. Hilariously, I have forgotten much of my own fics, so rereading is a hilarious mix of first-time discovery ("Whoa! What did I do here??") and remembering my own plans ("Oh, gosh, this was foreshadowing! Clem, you sly dog.") Obviously, they are not perfect or completed. I am unsure if they will ever be completed to the original vision I had for them. In fact, I have multiple word documents with new fics born from the love and curiosity that originally birthed the two crossovers, SM and DoD. I feel that they are better, more interesting, that they take different paths that I haven't really seen written before. Those may appear here as well. These fics and newer ones may also find their way to an AO3 account in the future, depending.

In conclusion, my old writing still gives me a bit of a blush, but I've come so far with my own self-esteem and mental health and general growing-up that I feel able to look them in the eye again. Shadow Magic and Descendants of Darkness are getting the dust shaken off as I take them out of hiding. They have some improvements included, but not the rewriting I had planned in a fit of optimism years ago. I hope they are what you remember, and bring you all the warm fuzzies and curiosity that other fics have given me through the years.

UPDATE 10/30/2016

I'm continuing to work on getting the next chapter of Shadow Magic posted, but until then I wanted to thank everyone who left a review on how excited they are to see it come back. I really appreciate the positivity and support, and am trying my best to keep at it when I can. However, some other reviews have made it clear to me that I also have to say:

I will not put up with rude reviews demanding I upload more RIGHT NOW, or scolding me for taking my fics down, or any other rude, demanding, condescending, patronizing, or insulting reviews. I'm not a child to be scolded. My original posting of fics was my choice, so other people could enjoy it and so I could get feedback. I wrote because I found it fun, I wrote it because it was the fic I wanted to read, and when having them posted stopped being fun and exciting and became a huge point of anxiety, I took them down. I can understand the frustration at seeing them removed, but no one has any right to argue my reasons for it or to scold me for doing what was best for me during a difficult time. Nor does anyone have to right to demand gimme gimme gimme right bloody now in a rude, demanding review. Besides not being a child, I'm not a robot or a servant. And when it comes down to it, these works are mine and mine alone, to do with as I will. That is the simple truth.

If you'd like to leave a review, please! Tell me if it's like how you remember, for better or for worse; tell me your impressions, how you're feeling, if you're reading for the first time. But remember that I am a person, that I am doing this in my free time when I have the spoons to spare towards rereading and figuring out this site again. And I am terribly unimpressed by rudeness and demands.