#catch me again when im 38 i guess maybe ill finally finish and publish it

[simmonsized]

Recently (over the last yearish) I completely rewrote and reworked a fanfic I started/worked on extensively when I was 17/18 years old, just for fun (I have done this sort of thing before, though usually recent stuff, only a few years out of date, which is how rng got published on ao3), and I was so lost in the sauce that it's now almost 25k, with scenes and side chapters still missing, and I just got really emotional because (warning novie backstory) I was so scared of my mom finding my extensive work of handwritten fanfiction while I was away at school, not because she would have gotten mad at me but because I am That Shy, that I burned it all (literally, lit on fire in the middle of the night and swept up the ashes and actually set my porch on fire briefly on accident) EXCEPT for this fic and one other, both of which I still have the original notebook paper copies of, and eventually uploaded to sit in my email storage forever (this is how I archive my old fic no it is not safe or very logical it's fine) or until I touched it again, which I actually did! The first time I rewrote part of this fic was seven years ago, actually, seven years from the time I first wrote it!

And I got emotional also because obviously she would be very embarrassed but I was just struck by the fact that this original concept is like 14 years old and I still loved it enough to write it all over again, twice, years and years later, and I think younger me would be baffled and delighted by how much longer it is now than it ever was before, and how much care I continue to put into things I refuse to publish, still, after all this time has passed, and after all the fandoms in between