Hey, guys. Hope you're doing well. Happy holiday season, to those who celebrate one or any this time of year.
A couple of announcements. First, you may have noticed that I've restricted both the fic and the comment section to registered users. There's been a recent sweep of nasty bots in my comments, and while most of it is obvious slop, it's still not pleasant reading. Also, I don't want my fic getting picked up by web scrapers or AI trawlers, so — it is what it is.
Second, and probably of more interest to most of you, starting tonight, I'm going to be taking Lionheart down temporarily using the "hidden collections" feature. The first purpose of this move will be to work on revising the first five books (brit-picking, plot holes, consistency, etc). I apologize if this disrupts your reading plans, but I think — to be honest — it will also be good for my mental wellbeing to take the story out of the spotlight for a while. Which brings me to the second purpose.
This community has been a wonderful place for me, but with the extraordinary privilege of writing something popular comes a lot of attention. To be blunt, I was not prepared for this kind of reception. When I wrote fanfic for smaller fandoms, I didn't understand what it felt like to have so many people reacting to your work. On the one hand, I have been given more praise and kindness and generosity than I can possibly deserve, for which I will always be grateful. Nothing that I am about to say should be taken as denying that the reception I have gotten for this fic is crazy positive, and nothing that I say should be taken as me being ungrateful or resentful of criticism. It's a normal part of writing for any audience that some people will not fuck with what you're doing, and that is totally fine. I would not want it any other way. But I think the fact that I take criticism as hard as I do means that my relationship with the fic/community may not be as healthy as it could be. In fact, it's been taking a pretty big mental toll, and it's really hurt my ability to interact with the fandom in many ways. I get anxious while I'm writing now; I can't write as quickly anymore, and I don't take the same joy in it that I used to. Taking this most recent break, after being pretty much consistently working on the fanfic for three years, made me realize how much I need to focus on healing my relationship with writing and with fan space. I need to go back to just... being a fan, for a while.
So I'm going to take a step back, do some revisions, and make sure that I am in a good physical and mental place before I come back to it. I apologize again. I know how many people will be disappointed by this. But I wouldn't do it unless I thought it was necessary to preserve my relationship with this fic and with this fandom.
To be clear, I'm not going to delete the fic. I'm going to use the collections feature to hide the work for a while until the revisions are done and I feel comfortable continuing. This is going to make some people unhappy, I know, and I'm sorry for that. I really am. Please forgive me and try to understand where I'm coming from.
