Author's Note

Hi! I’m a long time lurker and this is my first story here. Fair warning, I haven’t written creatively in… 20 years? It’s been a long time. And this is by far the longest thing I’ve ever written. But it’s a complete story - start to end. And for that I’m very proud.

It took me about 4.5 months to write this, which is crazy fast. I averaged over 2,500 words a day, which is not normal. At least not for me. 256,438 words in total. Wow.

There are so many great stories on this site and I wanted to give back.

But one of the things that always made me sad was a lot of the stories are abandoned. I’ve enjoyed so many for so long, but then they end in the middle.

Now, I’m never going to hold it against someone for not making it to the end - especially when so many of these stories are longer than mine. Writing is hard. Life gets in the way. You can have so many ideas running around in your head that it becomes impossible to concentrate on just one.

But I wanted to finish this story. I wanted to be able to give something with a beginning and an end. Something that wouldn’t leave you hanging. So I finished the story before I posted a single chapter here. It was risky. There were 2 times where I almost gave up. Another time when I thought I should go back and rewrite large chunks of it, which probably would have been the **** of the story.

When I started this story, I had something very different in mind. I didn’t have an outline, but there were specific scenes - specific beats I wanted to hit. I hit many of them. Some I didn’t. There were things I wish I had done better. Things that I never got around to putting in there.

But all in all, I’m happy with this story.

Maybe someday I’ll write a sequel. We’ll come back and see how all of the characters are, what other dangers they’ll face, and what happened to the world in the intervening time.

Or maybe not. We’ll see.

But at the end of the day, I want to thank all of the creators here for giving me so much to read - regardless of whether your stories are complete, in progress, or on hiatus.

And thank you to everyone who reads this story and all of the other stories here. If you enjoy it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know.

Thank you all again!