So, I finally did it! I finished deleting all my fics! I feel like throwing myself a party. I can’t believe I went through over 100 fics and almost 600,000 words. That is a feat in itself.

As I mentioned, I only left up Living With Myself and Family Issues. This was because of how important those stories were to me and to the person that I am today. But also because they were the only stories that I still liked and the only ones that I still felt proud of.

As I went through the whole deletion process I also backed up all the stories and organized the backups and all, and I did take a peek at some of those stories, mainly the longest ones and the most recent ones, because I wanted to compare my skills and how much I had improved.

Sadly, that was not much. A bit, yes, but not what I would call a huge improvement. In fact, it is only when I compare my fics writing to my original writing that I really see a significant improvement.

But the thing that really, really annoyed me, was how much less of a soul my stories had as I progressed on to the most recent ones. When I compare Family Issues to Apologies, or even to the All The Songs In The World series… yes, they are more complex, with a far more interesting world, but it also feels so soulless. So… meaningless… It’s hard to explain, but the thing that makes a story matter at a human level was much less in my newer stories than in my older stories.

Thankfully I realized this and worked hard on giving my original stories a soul, but it was difficult going and required a lot of work. I may be at around 800,000 words in original writing but I feel like I am only just barely scratching the surface of what I could do. And it also feels a lot like having to make up for all those years of fanfic writing where I didn’t make much progress at all. It makes me so mad how it feels like all that writing was useless because I didn’t get better in any meaningful way and now I have to work harder and faster to make up for the lost time.

I keep telling myself that I’m going to make a video about how writing fanfic is a bad idea if you ever want to become a better writer, but I keep forgetting. I’ve recorded like over a dozen by now and I just keep on forgetting. I’ll make a note on that, because I think that it’s a very complex idea that few people delve on. Like, it’s always completely pro fanfic or completely against fanfic, and I view the issue in a more complicated way.

Anyway, work on Broken Innocence is going well. I came upon a pretty complex scene very early on in the story and had to draft it before writing it because I couldn’t see it in my head, but now that I’ve got the draft for the scene I am SO PUMPED about writing it. It’s so complex because I’m tying it back to a different book about the earlier times of the world where SoulShattered takes place, but after this it should be more or less smooth sailing until I hit straight into the climax.

But still… SO EXCITED about this book.