Well, this is a long time coming I suppose.

Hello to anyone that still browses my fiction. It's been a long, hot minute since I last got anywhere on this site and that's a damn shame considering how much fun I was having with my stories. There are reasons though, both large and small: firstly, I had some home trouble that resulted in moving away that eventually lead to me losing access to this account. I didn't have the password handy and after a while I ended up forgetting about this site altogether due to some life events, and that caused me to forget my login, which I have since recovered obviously. Given my profile says it was last updated in 2013 (10-29-2013 to be exact), you can imagine it's be quite a ride, and while my time here focused on being after some serious life trauma, it didn't make the following years any easier.

Getting a job at first still granted me time to write--in fact, "Hollow" and "Dragon Fangs" were both worked on during my post-graduate work time, however this job didn't last and my time (and mental health) were whittled away until the stories stopped entirely. Just as well, I've lost the computer that held the original documents which were written when Microsoft Word was still a free, preloaded program on Windows computers, before Google Docs was the new replacement, and thus saved only as a hard copy on the computer itself, not in online storage. Thus, all of those old stories and the notes I had are gone, and while it's possible to copy the documents from here to Google Docs, I don't think I will as I have no further motivation to work on those older stories at this time. I do miss my narrative, but 7 years is a long time and I feel I've grown past what I can call my "middle phase" between Mary Sue-ness and original content (still kind of trope-riddled or borderline cringey but definitely not my worst work--looking at you, "Anime Dreamer" and whatever the hell that Itachi fic was). I won't remove the content for posterity and for those that enjoy the stories as they are, but I don't feel I'll be able to wrap up or continue the stories in any meaningful way; maybe one day I'll rewrite them, but that day is far off.

To those that follow those stories, I am sorry, but maybe you will enjoy my original content more? I haven't been a total bump on a log, just branching into world building and original work that's beyond a rehashed telling of an existing story or a few OCs among a cast of pre-made characters. Perhaps I'll post them here sometime when time allows. I'm currently amidst another housing dilemma during the COVID-19 crisis and internet is not easy to come by without my phone handy so activity is sparse.

I can't say my writing style has gotten better or not, I'm actually rather rusty and more accustomed to short one-off blog stories now than full narratives, so I tend to tell more than show and that doesn't suit a written multi-chapter idea very well. Much of my work has turned to roleplay chats interspersed with brief stories meant to share a point rather than take one along for the full ride, and that may not carry well here without the necessary context. We'll have to see.

In the meantime, I have been juggling ONE fanfiction idea that I never posted and have since reworked to be less... well... icky, due to the return of Avatar: The Last Airbender, however I consider this idea to be very personal and I don't think it will vibe with those that read it due to the content, alteration of the age rating the show operates on, the fact I constructed the narrative without connection to The Legend of Korra and don't acknowledge its influence on the series at all, and other things; similar reason can be said for my I don't think "Dragon Fangs" will find a conclusion anyway--too dissatisfying to those who may enjoy the story and will rage at me for my chosen conclusions. If I endeavor to write out what boils down to a full retelling of ATLA, I will need time and world building that I can't spare right now to keep the story cohesive and to make sure my chosen OC and her culture are both plausible but not overblown like her first incarnation.

Outside of that, I have several strings of character-oriented blogs from various projects I'm open to sharing here if anyone feel inclined to read them, but I don't expect to post a full story right now. Maybe that will change soon, but if anything, I want to build up a backlog of chapters and complete at least one part of it before starting to share so I don't leave anyone hanging again.

Thank you for reading this far, it means a lot to me in this time of chaos and inconsistency. (:

--Rae