Cancelling The Guilty Hornet Redo · 2:33pm Oct 16th, 2016
I'd like to begin by apologising to all of you for breaking my long silence with such a disappointing message, and especially to D48, who has spent months going over plans and drafts for the second version with me. I've promised a lot and delivered very little, and I'm very sorry for that.
The truth is that this story has been dead for some time now. I was working on it, but without a lot of enthusiasm, and got about three chapters drafted, two of which I think could use improvement - although multiple attempts to do so have had little effect. Three chapters is not a whole lot, especially for a story of the size I'd planned it to be, and the rate of writing was atrocious. At this rate, it would have taken more than a year to finish, possibly more than two, and that's provided nothing went wrong.
There are a few reasons writing this got so slow, not least my wavering interest in the idea as a whole, but the final nail in the coffin is that I'm a hell of a lot busier than I used to be. When I was writing the original story, I'd have hours of free time even on weekdays, but now I'm at university it's all evaporated. My day is much longer than it was - I leave earlier and come home hours later - and 2-3 hours each day are eaten up by note-making or doing homework.
When all's said and done, I have maybe a quarter of the free time I used to have, and generally I just feel like sleeping at that point. Actually motivating myself to write (which, let's face it, feels like work a lot of the time) is hard, and most of the time I come back to it a day or two later and feel like scrapping everything I'd written. It's not a productive way to be, and finishing anything I write, let alone a project of Guilty Hornet's scale, has become a feat of willpower.
When it comes down to it, I have a choice between trying to write a story I might not even finish and updating every few months, or dropping it and using the free time to finish my other ongoing project before it ends up the same way as Guilty Hornet. The other story has an end in sight, and I still enjoy writing it, whereas Guilty Hornet lost its fun factor about a week in and turned into a slog. I kept going as long as I did because I felt I owed you a finished story, but it's just not going to happen. I'd rather leave you with your own ideas of where it could have gone than deliver a disappointment, so I'm cancelling the story.
If anyone wants to use the base idea, feel free. You don't need to ask for permission, or even give me any credit, but I would like to know if anyone does anything with it, if only because I'd like to see some good come out of all this. I won't be writing anything with this base premise again in all likelihood, so I'd like to pass the idea onto you, to do with (or not) as you wish.
Sorry to all of you for being the bringer of such disappointment, and for promising what i couldn't deliver. D48, I really appreciated all the help and inspiration you gave me, and I'm sorry to have wasted your time.
It's a little sad to see it go; but at the end of the day, if you were no longer enjoying working on it, then letting it go is probably the right thing to do. Better to spend the effort continuing a project that still gets you going. I wish you luck with it!
That's a real shame, although I understand why you made the decision you did. Still, if something changes in the future and you decide you want to go back to this, feel free to let me know. It'll probably be worth at least giving this another thought after you finish your other story, although with the stupidity the writers threw at the changelings recently and the fact that there are always more things to do that time to do them in I'll definitely understand if you decide to prioritize something else over this.
Too bad, but it is I understand your desire to finish what you can. Better to keep writing and improving than let one thing become a lead weight.