#that test was a fkn fever dream

[sungbeam]

GUYS I THINK I INTERPRETED MY SCATTER PLOT WRONG ON MY EXAM FJCJSKFN FAWK.

[justjstuff]

I just wanted to let you know that I am a ginormous fan of DOF and looked forward to Fire Friday every week! Your writing skills are astounding and I’m so thankful for your incredible depiction of Sakura’s bad-ass personality and story in this fic. Not only that, I am amazed at all the consistently LARGE contribution you used to upload weekly because the quality is literally off the charts. I’m so thankful that you’re taking a break because I know that accomplishing all of this as well as you do cannot be easy! Nonetheless, I would like for you to know that you have a huge fan in me and I will continue to look forward to new chapters (whenever they may come-excellence takes time 😉). Really though, I can’t stop gushing about this fic and I guess just thank you for all of the hard work you put in it so people like me can get some free serotonin each time we read it lol. You’re amazing!!

Anon-san, your sweet words give me life, thank you so so much. I've had a lot of people tell me how much the weekly updates were grounding and a breath of fresh air in this pandemilovato but your comment has to be one of the best I've got so far because.... oh man, I desperately need not only others but also myself to realise just how taxing it was.

So yeah, thank you for loving my story but also thank you for reminding myself that it was a HUGE accomplishment and that it's okay if I maybe can't meet it anymore. I've recently begun digging deep into myself and started going to more intensive (and intrusive) therapy and had some diagnosis that are pretty mindblowing in a way and now I'm trying to be mindful not to push myself to my limits. It's hard af, let me tell you, I know the potential I have and it feels normal to always want to achieve it but I gotta remind myself that maybe my "full potential" isn't as healthy as I thought it was.

I'm extremely glad that I got the opportunity to give y'all that experience of nice 8-12k long chapters a week, with lots of character and plot work, at roughly the same time, every Fire Friday. *aggressively throws serotonin everywhere I can •̀.̫•́✧*

(pagebreak bc y'all didn't sign up for hugeass posts in your dash lol)

For a bit of an update on how my process is coming along: I got sick. Covid got me y'all and I still only had the first dose and suffer from asthma so daaamn this motherfucker's got hands. No need to worry about me tho!! My tests are coming back okay and at least my fever is gone BUT that means my brain is a bit like mush rn and while I'm still working, I'm doing so veeery much slower. Anyways, covid was just the cherry on top this month but I don't want to get too deep into it.

I genuinely think Fire Fridays were good not only for you guys (esp during that time back in 2020 where literally everyone was at home and routines were thrown out the window faster than you can say defenestration) but also for me, it gave me a nice sense of "normal" when everything was shit. Uuhh as you've seen in my last AN, I dropped out of college and am currently pursuing other dreams/way of living so I think having that set date will help me A LOT while juggling real life and fandom life. That being said, some things had to change.

First of all is the way of seeing Fire Fridays as if it's a deadline set by my boss. Nah, I don't get paid for writing fanfiction and I'm done treating it as a job. I know not a lot of people have the same care that you did while commenting and there is a lot of nagging and grumbling about Fire Fridays (even if sometimes those comments are even sweet while they do it) but I'm incredibly proud to say that comments from people in the internet I don't know hardly have an affect on me. Lol y'all haters can hate but I'm my worse critic and I fkn know it, nothing you say will change the way I see myself and my work. That being said, a lot of that nagging was being unconsciously done by me *gasp* I know. I'm an overachiever. Shocking.

NO MORE OF THAT.

Next order of business is how I was going about Fire Fridays. My first break came because I literally didn't have any "spare chapters" meaning, I wrote, edited, sent for my Beta to edit, and then edited myself again a whole ass 9k monster every week and that shit was like a kick to the ass right into the general direction of Burnout City. Not fun. So I took a "break" which wasn't really a break because I still wrote 71k words in that month and when I started back up with Fire Fridays, I had a lot of chapters to post, right? WRONG. If each chapter had 10k words (which is roughly what was happening on an average), that meant I only had 7 new chapters to post with severe burnout making it practically impossible for me to write anything else to the point that I couldn't even bring myself to edit the first drafts of those chapters. Again. Not fun.

So now, my idea has been: try to aim for Fire Fridays in a healthy way but also let my readers know they might not get another batch of those lovely what? six months of new chapters every friday. What does that mean? Well, it means I'm trying to write some chapters ahead! So while y'all aren't really getting anything since the last chapter, that has been a conscious decision on my part not to leave y'all with horrible cliffhangers when I can't be sure I'll make quick enough updates (and that definition has changed to maybe twice a month? We'll see). I'm writing. It's going fairly slowly by my standards but since I've come really close to giving up on DoF in favour of RL original content, I'm proud of it.

YOU're amazing, Anon-san. Thank you so much for reaching out, I hope you have a lovely end of the week and that you and your loved ones are safe and happy as can be in late stage capitalism <3