The Beginning

In short, I have been at a loss on what to do. I pursued a new hobby; a faint twinkling of hope in a dream that had not yet died.

I took up writing. My first piece in this endeavor was inspired by a beautiful, atmospheric piece of art on Twitter. I was so moved, I wanted to capture that emotion I felt — whatever it was.
Thus, this bit of fan fiction was created.
A culmination of all my skill I had honed from crafting Facebook and Twitter posts. It wasn’t much hahaha, but I made a thing. All the other things I’d made before paled in comparison, not due to any metric of quality, but due to the intended audience.
It was public, made for strangers’ eyes instead of friends and acquaintances.

It picked up a little traction, surprisingly, because I had linked the artist’s tweet, and said artist retweeted it. I had deliberately avoided the ‘Quote Tweet’ feature so that I wouldn’t ride on their coattails, so to speak.
I wasn’t about to undo an unexpected boon, of course, so I left it as it was and enjoyed my one minute of fame while it lasted.

I wrote a few more fan fiction after that, churning out as many as I could. I was so sure I had paced myself well, yet I had ultimately burnt out. Between looking for an easygoing (but proportionately low paying) job and doing my best to improve quickly, perhaps it was inevitable. I simply did not know my limits.

I took a break, convinced that I would come back soon. Weeks soon turned to months. I had written quite a lot during that time but published nothing. Each project was long and I demanded quality of myself. I was sure that, as long as I took my time with it, the eventual results would speak for itself.

There were no eventual results. There were 5 months of nothing. Even my smallest project hadn’t been published because I wanted every sentence to be significant in some way. To load every character with character — every event with meaning.
There was no helping it, I suppose.

Until now.
Inspired by a novel that was simultaneously cliche yet intriguing, a hypothetical deviation from cliches formed. An empty frame of a story.
Past frustrations loosely coalesced, and I fit its uncertain shape into the skeletal frame I now held in my head. Thoughts flowed onto the digital pages. They streamed forth from a hand pump that had no apparent bottom. Whenever I grew tired or uninspired, I read the aforementioned novel to take a break, but it refreshed my desires instead. Somehow, I thought of ways ‘I could do better than the author’ instead of enjoying the story — as if I was a haughty, egotistical critic. Maybe I am a haughty, egotistical critic, it’s hard to tell.
Regardless, I kept being inspired, and I finished the story. The above mentioned novel, I mean, not my work-in-progress.

Upon its completion, I realised I wanted to do more. Since my story differed from the things I had published up to that point — all fan fiction — I wanted a website to collect all my written stuff together.
A recent videogame review, all past fan fiction, original fiction, and all future written stuff in one place.
If for no one else, I, at least, wanted an easy place for myself to see an overview of my work.

That brings us here.
You of the future, however you stumbled here, thank you for reading this far.
Let ‘future me’ know how I’m doing. It’s impossible to view myself as anyone more than a jaded teenager, even after all these years. I’m sure ‘future me’ would appreciate it.