An APJFM update and a small preview
(Spoilers for APJFM to chapter 138. Oops. Sorry Candlestar <3 )
The other day, I read a fanfic.
It was super long — over a hundred chapters! — but I read it all in three days.
I could barely tear myself away.
The fic wasn’t finished. So I went and read the author’s tumblr. Every blessed page of it. All the character asks, all the details about her writing process, all the hints about what was to come.
All the times she promised a happy ending.
Yes, she was telling the truth. I got a sneak peek at the epilogue.
Then I backed up a bit and looked at where she got stuck.
Poor gal got so burnt out in April. She’d been writing the same story for nearly a decade, and she couldn’t fit it all in her head the way she used to.
So many of her beta readers and loyal commenters had moved on. It felt so lonely, sometimes. But she understood.
It sure changed her. She could barely remember the depressed young mother she was when she started writing. How the only thing that made her happy was figuring out what would happen next, and the only thing she looked forward to was knowing how it ended.
There was an actual, physical feeling that came with writing the story. It was a sense of lightness, excitement and consuming love, as Sans might feel as he poured his soul into trying to fix his beloved’s world.
She sustained that fire for years, long after recovering from depression. But the better she got at writing, the more the old mistakes jumped out at her. She started feeling embarrassed by the early sex scenes. She cringed at the clumsier bits of dialogue. She realized exactly what she should have cut, and what she should have added. She wanted to try writing something completely different.
The fire sputtered out just as she was reaching the end. The feeling of love and excitement vanished. Without it, her writing felt forced and disjointed.
She let herself move on. Not for good, she told herself. Just until the spark came back.
That’s why she read her story again, eight months later. She’d hoped she could find it.
“He had a short conversation with you, which, to my great annoyance, I couldn’t hear.”
Jerren’s line from Chapter 97 nagged at her.
What did Sans say to Reader before he died?
She’d written out a lot of the unpublished events, just to know what happened. The events of the great reset between chapters 66 and 67. The dialogue between Sans and Gracie as she tried to kill him. Jerren’s conversation with Reader’s father.
But she’d never written out that death scene.
And I wanted to know exactly what Jerren hadn’t been able to hear.
Then I realized how it fit into the story.
I saw what I needed to change to get on track.
I realized I was a lot closer than I thought. All that stupid, clunky stuff I tried forcing myself to write in April? Actually, it wasn’t bad. It could be made good. And then it would be a bridge to the scenes I’d already written, and to the ending and epilogue.
Now, here I am, and I worry that it’s been so long that I’ve lost all my readers. Intellectually, I know there’s some of you left. Emotionally, I’m sure everyone’s forgotten.
Although I wrote the first sixty-seven chapters for me, I wrote the next seventy for my readers. (I knocked myself out with all those CSS effects for you, too. You’re welcome.)
But I think the last few chapters are for me, again.
Because at a certain point, well before I published anything to AO3, I wrote a rough draft clear to what’s now chapter 67. I looked at it and realized:
Now what? Do I leave this story where it is, and go try to write something original?
Or do I keep going, and see it through to the end?
I knew that the rational decision would be to write something original.
Ration’s never been my strong point.
I made myself two promises:
First, if I published it, I’d finish it. I’d read enough fanfics at that point to know how an unfinished story eats at its frustrated readers. And I wanted to break my habit of starting projects, then abandoning them.
Second, I would follow the story wherever it took me. No matter how weird it got, no matter how long it was. I would keep going until I had written it the way it needed to be.
I made a commitment to my story.
And in return, it changed my life.
Anyway, I don’t have anything to post yet. I’m not going to start posting until I have a full draft written to the very end. That’ll take some time, maybe a month or two.
But if you’re still with me, please say hi. Ask any of the characters anything. Tell me your favorite scene. Ask me about my writing process. Or just tell me you’ll wait. I could use some encouragement.
Thanks for sticking with me for all this time.
What? You want to know what Sans said to Reader as he died in the grand finale?
my eye lights are gone for good. everything around me is fuzzy and fading fast.
“And maybe the next you will find the next me,” she continues, her voice cracking. “Maybe they’ll know. Somehow.”
“maybe,” i murmur. “if he even… gets ten minutes with her… he’s sunk.” i reach out, groping around weakly for her. she takes my hand and presses it to her heart. “just like… me.”
