MAY 2008
I rewrote Chapter 12 of 'dawning' and I'm almost ready to send it to my beta for her approval. If she's reading this I'm sure she's thrilled to hear that. ;) Chapter 13 has a couple of scenes already written, but they're really rough.
I must admit, with the recent events in the manga, it is very hard for me to remain focused on 'dawning.' My mind keeps going in other directions with fic ideas and I just can't seem to stay on course long enough to get stuff done. I was advised to stop reading the manga until 'dawning' is finished but I quickly dismissed that notion.
Stop reading the manga?? Now?! HA!
So anyway, I'm alive and kicking. And working. Really. ;)
» Why is 'dawning' taking you so long to update/finish?
No one wants dawning to be finished more than I do. Honest.
That said, in late 2005/early 2006 I had a "mini" real life crisis that caused me to drop fanfiction and pull down a large anime/manga fandom site called sugoiweb.com because I could no longer afford to keep it up. This meant that the 800+ fanfiction and fanart submissions that I once hosted had to go. I kept the files, hoping to someday bring the site back... but it seems that is no longer a possibility.
In July 2006, my hard drive died and I lost over 6 gigabites of data. This included sugoiweb and all of my fanfictions, outlines, short stories, freelance work, etc. Unfortunately due to other hardware issues, my backups were a bit incomplete, so I lost just about everything. It was a very upsetting loss. Not to mention more than a little discouraging. And I still find myself discovering more things that were lost even 2 years after the fact.
Even so, a decent chunk of what I was able to recover was at least 6 months to a year out-of-date. This included dawning and several other fanfictions that I had been tinkering with. As a result, I have had to do massive rewrites, etc.
So... I've been a little busy. And real life is still not being kind with the free time.
» Story Alerts/Favorites vs. Reviews
Okay, this isn't meant to be a rant by any means, but I feel the need to express this on behalf of us lowly fanfiction authors out there.
Please, if you are going to take the time to add a story or author to your 'Alert' list or 'Favorites' list, do that author a kindness and say a little something in the form of a review.
Don't get me wrong. It pleases me to see that someone likes what I do enough that they want to be alerted when I add a new chapter, etc. -- but getting a comment on a story, even if it's just a simple, "Nice work!" or "Thanks for writing this. I really enjoyed it!" is very encouraging. If you don't write fanfiction then you really have no idea how motivating feedback like that can be.
Granted, I absolutely love the long, constructive feedback (who doesn't?) but I feel like a lot of readers use the alert system in place of writing a review because they know that the fanfiction.net system will notify us when someone adds our stories to their alert list. And while seeing that a story has been added to an alert list is positive in its own way, it does not take the place of a review. (Even if it's just a short & simple two-word review like "Nice work!")
Just food for thought. ;)
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