[SPECIAL:] Acknowledgements

And so the story ends.

Emma and James get to walk off into the sunset, and if you’ve stuck with them right up until the end… thank you. I’ve loved writing this story – it’s been a pleasure, an escape and one hell of an adventure. And at nearly 100,000 words, it adds up to a decent paperweight, too. That’s the kind of book you could bang down on your bedside table with dignity. Hey, it’s longer than The Great Gatsby.

It’s also barely a quarter of A Game of Thrones, but Game of Thrones can fuck right off, okay? This is my moment.

No sex scene with Emma just yet (hey, I’ve gotta save something for the sequel), but… what’s that, Artoo? There’s something different about Chapter 7? Something weird but kinda awesome? Yeah, like what?

Wait. WAIT no hold the fucking phone. You don’t mean…

OH FUCK YEAHHHHH, TIME TO LET OFF THE FIREWORKS, BITCHES –

HOT SWEET JEHOSOPHAT ON A STICK, we did it! We made it, y’all! (Actually, we did even better than that – nearly 100 of you were sweet enough to leave a like on Ch. 7, which tips us comfortably over the edge into the top ten list of chapters.) Hopefully that means that new people will continue to discover the story, even though I’m not regularly updating any more – which is awesome.

The front page, um, doesn’t seem to have updated just yet, but fingers crossed, hey? (If anyone’s active on the CHYOA forums, maybe you could do me a solid and ask Friedman to take a look at the top ten chapter list… I’d do it myself, but it feels a bit awkward asking for your own story to get an upgrade, lol.)

But a deal’s a deal, regardless – y’all are very definitely getting an early Christmas present. ;) Scroll down if you’re curious…

First, though, I just wanted to take a sec to say a sincere and grateful thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a thought or a lovely comment. (Y’all didn’t leave me any choice but to post, did you?)

Neaseon paid me a mega-huge compliment by saying that he’d probably still be reading the story even if it didn’t star Emma Watson, while darkmaster206 very reasonably pointed out that after all that shit, I’d better write a happy ending if I didn’t want to reenact Mass Effect 3 on your undeserving asses. (Which, yeah, fair enough.) Demonic19040, Omar316 and deathtome1998 left very nice comments voting for an epilogue, while mrawesome850 and bladeleg dangerously inflated my ego by letting me know I’d succeeded in making them feel bummed as hell about the end of Chapter Twelve. (You’d think I’d be unhappy about that, but writers are like sadistic bastard rollercoaster tycoons, man – we engineer this shit, we actually want to make you feel sad and mad and choked-up and so on. And occasionally, we hurl a double corkscrew in there just for good measure. So it’s lovely to know that shit worked.)

Kulingile prompted a proper fist-bite moment by generously referring to Ultimate Fantasies as ‘a beautiful love story,’ which, FUCKING AWWWH, I love you guys, seriously. DavianThule1 was gracious enough to say thanks for the ride whether it carried on or not, and Shifterr damn near exploded my gratitude glands by calling it ‘one of the best stories on this site’. (He’s also been supportive since the very first PSAs, so thanks, man, I haven’t forgotten that.)

Scouser96 left one of my favorite comments ever by telling me to go finish the story however I envisioned it – be that happy or sad or whatever. That’s a fuckload of trust and I hope I lived up to it, at least a little! And kni3ra left a really, really lovely thank-you, while also paying me one of the highest compliments a writer can hope for: ‘it’s really weird how we are reading an erotic story, but at the same time i actually feel invested in the characters’. Which, FUCK YEAH, THAT’S WHAT WE AIM FOR HERE ON ULTIMATE FANTASIES, BOOOOMM

Deadpool1989 and demonic19040 also left massively supportive message in m'inbox, so cheers for that, fellas, it makes my day when you do that. daybreak successfully guilt-tripped the living daylights out of me, and finally, the immortally-christened Isaac is yo mama wrote in to flatter my dumb ass still further and say a fuckton of amazingly nice things about the story. (To answer your question, hell yeah, there’s more coming – Ultimate Fantasies was always planned as a banner under which to run multiple stories in the same universe!) So I can’t thank you enough for that… and that goes for all y’all, to be honest.

But okay OKAY that’s enough of my yammerin’ horseshit, you want to get on with the good stuff! So, here, as promised, is a bonus sexy chapter, in which I’m trying out a couple of new things. All I’ll say is that it starts at midnight on Emma’s birthday… and that it’s an experience she’ll never forget!

Enjoy the chapter, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Your friendly neighborhood writing monkey,
TheOptimisticDuck