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// Retrospection: Author's Notes II 
// Story: Within The Seas of The Galaxies 
// by Soothing Stone 
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Apologies, but this felt strongely needed.

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It has been a long, long time since I came to write WIthin The Seas of The Galaxies, and not as long since I finished it. LIke I had written in the first Author's Notes chapter, it was a nice feeling to finally move on to something else after working on a story as long as that.

This won't repeat anything I said there, but more or less looking back at this story and giving some new insight into how things went and how I view the story today.

In short, I think I would like to say that the time between then and now was some of the roughest periods of my lifetime. Remember when I had something about suicidal tendancies? It got worse, and I cane close to ending it all several times. I am considering seeing a doctor whenever things clear up, but there's a bunch of issues right now that have to be resolved before i can do so.

But how do I view the story now?

That is the million dollar question. 

I feel divided about it, and how I feel about it can range from thinking it was quite an accomplishment to bring to its state to thinking it was one of the worst mistakes of my lifetime.

Whenever I reflect back to the process of writing this story, I remember all the pain and doubt that I had experienced. As I had said before, I came close to tearing down the story as soon as the first chapter, The early negative comments cut deep and they still do. It's one area I seriously need to fix, but it came to being that it was also from serious self image problems, but nevertheless the critism was not something I could take well.

And then I remember the feeling that I was throwing all my effort and resources into a story that was not worth a damn. I mean it too. I had to stop several times because my emotions were so out of whack that the idea of writing another word to it was just stomach churning. 

In the end, a part of me only remembers how heart breaking it was to do this. I wanted to quit, I wanted to never write another fanfic again, I cancelled plans to do a grimdark sequel where Spike finds out that Twilight gave herself the Alicorn Spell instead of Rarity and wanted revenge for it, and it just spilled over to Fallen Apple, my next project, but that deserves a post of its own.

But on the other hand...it does help that I got a huge outpouring of support and praise for this. I got PMs from users I had never met that expressed the most sincere amount of love for my story, and sometimes I wonder if they read a different story.

Not to mention, this became my second most popular story ever on FIMFiction. My most popular is, of course, Pinkie Pie Discovers Coffee, but WOW it amazes me to see this. Did it come as easily in views as PPDC? No, and it's still not as much. But given what I had aimed for, it amazed me all the same.

To end this, would I have done this again?

I will be honest to God with you all. You deserve the best for taking this story to the heights it did.

I would not have written WIthin The Seas of The Galaxies if I knew then what I knew this story would do to me. In the end, I confess that the side that regrets this won out by a slight margin. It was still so painful to make and I would never want to go through anything like that again. I went through that experience with Fallen Apple and a fanfic that never saw the light of day and I dropped them instantly, and never want to do them again because of the sheer negative emotions I get when I think of them.

But it's clear you liked it. In the end, that's all that matters. I know this might have been more downbeat than you would like, but I felt I needed to be honest. And again, thank you so much for your support through the four months that I wrote this. I do not know where this story would have been without your support.

Soothing Stone