Hello there!

My name is Lavender. I've been around in the fandom since late 2011, and I'm a musician. I started reading fanfiction in the super early days of the fandom where stories were shared primarily on Google Docs, while working a really crap job. It's what got me through the week, and it was the one thing I looked forward to while there, besides going home.

As I said before, I'm a musician. It's what I trained in, and it's the career path I've chosen. However since a very young age I've enjoyed writing stories, and I've been told I'm good at it. However I've never really felt like anything I wrote was worth publishing. In the six and a half years I've been in the fandom, I've written probably a dozen first chapters or short stories, a couple of them have even seen an editor and they're ready for publication, but I never went through with it.

I was afraid.

Genuinely, I have no formal training in writing whatsoever. It might seem ridiculous to be too nervous to post things on a fanfiction website, but I'm a ****ing perfectionist, to a fault. I was afraid of my writing being sub-par, I was afraid of my characters being bland, I was, in short, afraid of being mediocre. I didn't want to put out anything that wasn't one-hundred-percent my best effort, something engaging, something worthwhile, and just maybe something others would look forward to reading, just as I did.

This mindset has long since carried over to my music. Anyone that has followed my journey probably knows this, too. My uploads are sporadic, infrequent, and often see monumental leaps in quality between them, rather than a natural progression of skill. I look back on my old work from the early days, and I feel it's hard to recognise that it was indeed my work. There's no transition, it's just suddenly better, because I've sunk hours into projects that were doomed to never see the light of day.

This year I've been aiming to change this. Perfect is the enemy of good, as the saying goes, and I've fallen victim to this on so many occasions it would seem laughable if you counted them all. Since the summer I've put well into 200 hours into a full length album I will be publishing in the new year. Nothing has been abandoned, left half finished, but also none of it is being held to an immeasurable standard of unreachable perfection. I won't let myself spin forever in one place, achieving practically nothing.

"Lavender!" I hear you shouting at your screen. "This is FiMFiction, not SoundCloud! Why are you saying this here?!"

First of all, SoundCloud doesn't have a blog (Though it really should) but I think there is a direct correlation to the fact I've done a lot of writing and never released any, and my inability to let go of music that isn't 'perfect' in my mind. I want to extend this effort to actually publish works into the field of writing.

I've had the idea for this story for some time, and I recently wrote the first chapter of Opening Hours, a story about Lyra Heartstrings, and the daily life of working in a music shop. The first chapter will be published in the coming days, it's likely already out if you're reading this.

So, if you do take the time to read my story, thank you for taking the time out of your day to do so, and I very much hope that you look forward to the coming chapters, and that they become something to look forward to.

Yours faithfully,
Lavender