Leaving Home and the WriteOff Group · 12:36am Sep 20th, 2022
Hey, everyone. If you’ve read any of my posts over the last few months, you’ll know my mother recently passed away from cancer. One of her final requests was that she be buried in her hometown, so I am journeying with my father and brother up north to commit her ashes to the earth. I still haven’t finalized the eulogy I want to give at the funeral, which is part of the reason I’m typing all of this. I needed some distance before I could really figure out what I wanted to say.
After the funeral, my father wanted to take a trip across the country to places he hadn’t been to before. He turned seventy just a month after Mom died and had been planning the trip with her last year, but the circumstances have obviously changed. I am accompanying him now, as he has persistent breathing problems and may have to get a lung transplant in the coming months, and I obviously didn’t want him wandering the country by himself. My brother is also coming along since he is autistic and the services we would normally use to take care of him aren’t available. This will take around three months in total, with us wandering place to place and visiting relatives until just before Christmas.
Despite everything that led up to this trip, I’m going to do my best to make the most of this journey. I want to provide emotional support for my father (who has been hit the hardest by Mom’s passing), as well as experience new parts of the country. I also hope that this trip will allow me to create more in both fanfiction and professional work. I took a trip to Michigan about a week ago and found my creative spirit stirred by the new surroundings, so I’m hoping this shuffle throughout the nation will provide similar stimuli.
This temporary change in lifestyle will likewise be followed by an exodus from a group that I’ve been involved with for years on this website: the WriteOff Group. This group hosted several writing events a year, generally focused around minifics and short stories for both original and MLP fiction. However, I’ve found myself participating less and less in the contests. The reasons are twofold: One, participation in the group has gone down enough from seven years ago to where there is little feedback from other writers, which negates a major draw in doing the events. And second, I’ve found myself with enough professional and fanfiction projects that taking time to do the contests distracts from progressing with those prospects. WriteOff events were fun when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write, but I’ve figured out what I want to write now and have plenty of outlines waiting to be brought to life.
I want to stress that this departure from WriteOff is not due to anything the moderators or other authors did. Rodger Dodger, Horizon, CoffeeMinion, and the other mods deserve nothing but praise for creating such a creatively stimulating group and I hope they continue to have successful interaction with those who continue to use the group. I have simply changed as a writer and need different methods to bring my ideas to light. This departure is an idea I’ve been toying with for some time, but the upcoming familial sabbatical has convinced me that now was time to move on.
In terms of what I plan to do in the coming months, there is only one long-term project that I know will be done during this trip: the Solomon Kane crossover I mentioned last year. I’d originally planned to only do a single crossover, but I’ve been reading some of the old Marvel comics he was featured in and found that I wanted to do multiple stories with the character. I won’t spoil what will come, but just know that there will be a Solomon Kane/MLP story on the front page of this site by Halloween. There will be other stories I’ll do for this site (the Ancestral Tribute contest will definitely get a submission from me), but this is the only one I can comfortably promise.
That’s all for right now. Thanks for sticking around, and I hope to have something for you to read soon.
Best wishes, liberty. Hoping you can take some time on this journey of yours to see new things, and above all to heal. May your mother rest in peace.
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Thank you.