A Song of Acceptance, OR: The Subtle Art of Returning to Writing After Giving Up

Dear friends and followers,

Damn, it's been a minute since I last sat down and wrote one of these things. A longer minute than it's been since I scrubbed my page of any evidence that I ever wrote, though.

It's at this point that I'd like to apologize. Looking back at the comments and other engagements, it's clear that some of y'all actually did enjoy my work, and just because I was embarrassed by it for a time doesn't mean I had the right to take any of it away from you.

So why did I do it, then? Well... that's both simple and complicated. Simple because it can be effectively summed up with a single statement such as "I was embarrassed." But also complex, because it's a lot more nuanced than just that, and I just simply don't have the words to explain it. I'm going to try, though.

About midway through the planned arc for Song of Transformation, I lost track of my own plans for the story. A long-since-deleted blog post details this fact, even if that's the only detail I remember about it after all this time. I don't remember the exact wording I used, but I do remember that being the summary of the post. I'd lost track of what I was trying to do with the story, and gone back to read what I'd published up to that point for inspiration. What I found was... lackluster, to put it nicely. I very clearly didn't have nearly the writing skills I do now when I started that story (and even now, my skills aren't all that great). The storytelling was so heavy-handed that it practically generated its own gravitational field, punctuation and sentence structure suffered pretty badly, so on and so forth. I could go on for days about this topic, but I think you get the point. Anyway, I made the decision to edit and re-release... something that for whatever reason I can't be bothered recall at this point I could not execute properly, and that ultimately had no impact on the primary problem of me not knowing how to get from point H (the point I left on) to point Z (the planned ending of SoT). So I let it rot eternally in "Incomplete" status.

During this time. NaNoWriMo/NaPoWriMo came around, and I mistakenly started another project. This one was My Little Reclaimer: Friendship Never Dies. Another promising concept with no execution, and another story languishing in "Incomplete" status for whatever original reason, and because a side effect: I lost my inspiration to write. So frustrated with my inability to perform, I did the worst thing you can possibly do in the creative world.

I gave up.

I gave up so thoroughly that not only did I move the stories to "Cancelled" for a bit, before outright un-submitting them. I released a blog detailing the rough outline I'd had at some point for each of my stories, and then shortly afterword deleted all my blog posts. Those actually did get deleted, BTW. Unlike with stories, you don't have a button option to revoke your submission on a blog post. I proceeded to go radio silent for a couple years (yes, it actually has been that long. I know, WTF. I agree.) toying with a couple ideas in private but ultimately trying to hand most of them off to authors I knew were far more successful than I. I'm not going to make excuses, or try to explain my reasoning for this, because I honestly don't know myself. I'm a trucker turned soldier, not a psychologist damn it! I will say I'm sorry, though. You all trusted me to continue delivering updates on my stories until they were completed, and I failed spectacularly. I'm truly sorry.

Anywho, it took the show literally ending for me to pick up the pen again, and even then it was because the idea was banging on my head and wouldn't let me sleep until I let it out. The result was surprisingly well received, and as of the time of this blog post still has yet to receive a single downvote, surprisingly. This shouldn't matter. It shouldn't be important in any way, shape or form. But it does, and it is, because this gave me the inspiration I needed to work up the courage to start what I'm currently doing.

I've resubmitted my 2 older, more major works, and am working on 4th story as we speak. You'll know it when you see it. I'm ever so slowly working on updates to both SoT and MLR:FND. They'll come out once they're written, and after I've had an editor take a look at both them AND the already-published bodies of the stories, as well as after implementing any changes identified by said editor. I had a lot of free time in basic training, and that translated into both a bit of writing and quite the chance to reflect on what I've done and how I would or wouldn't have approached it differently.

Slowly but surely, I'm coming back. And I look forward to finishing these stories and many more for your entertainment in the future.

Yours in harmony,
Mystic Thunder