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This is my new story.
It’s a story about give and take. Push and pull.
Puppy dog love and pit bull hate.
About a girl and her computer and her wild imagination, which will never just fuck off long enough for her to get a spare thought in edgewise. It’s a story about a joke, her first fanfic written in jest, then about a challenge. A sidestep. Stretching her fingers and her words for the pure fucking thrill of it. The linguistic exploration of it. Playing with plot lines like there was nothing wrong with it, molding characters into everything they shouldn’t be.
She was pretty fucking brave there, for a while.
Now, this girl, let’s talk about her. That’s something that should be done, given the conjecture, don’t you think? Let’s set the record straight. Yes, let’s. She’s a Pisces who lives in the mountains. A fish, surrounded by rock. She paints too little and smokes too much and covers herself in tattoos she doesn’t want to explain to you. She dreams in technicolor and her favorite words are the bad ones. She is married to her high school sweetheart and, yeah, they’ve tagged their fair share of walls together. She climbed rocks until she tore out her shoulder and quoted Fight Club at her wedding. She’s turning thirty in few months and still feels as soft and vulnerable as a baby most of the time. She grew up without a television, she hates peanut butter, and she likes to think she’s tough.
But she really isn’t.
She didn’t really know what she was doing here so, she just went for it. Some might call that courage but, really, it was just dumb fucking luck. Or stupidity. Or genius. Who knows? All she knows is that she can’t stop writing. She’s always written, and she winds up a little crazy inside if she goes too long without stringing letters together like beads on a string. That’s definitely called a compulsion, she’s sure of it. She loves these stories, in ways that she can’t even express, in ways that no one will ever understand, because there’s too much of her in them to unravel the giant, tangled mess. Too much unresolved angst and tormented trauma that she’s pulled out from underneath her skin. Too much of her own hurt and anger and fear and curiosity taken out on words that she tried to pass off as fanfiction.
Her time here has taught her a lot.
It taught her to write a story, how to round out an arc and how to dip her head into a character. It taught her not to be so damn stubborn all the time, to let the characters just run with it. It taught her to follow them, even when it was scary. Especially when it was scary. It taught her to breach her barriers and to connect with other writers, ones that she secretly and shyly admires and respects, all of whom are doing things here that elevate fanfiction to entirely new levels. Her time here taught her to lay it all out on paper but, she missed the class on how to bite her tongue, which may have been the most important lesson. It taught her that some people will just take and take and take and that nothing will appease them, not even her appetite or her sanity, and that she would wind up starved and insane if she let herself. It taught her to hold on tight to those who are in it for the good, and it taught her that she just cannot control everything.
Just enough that she can begin to feel ok again.
She has been slowly compiling her fics into PDFs for a while now. Call them ‘ongoing projects.’ Mostly for herself. These copies include the beautiful banners that were made for her by people who are far more talented than she is. They include all of her selected outtakes and the other removed material she chopped at the last minute. The photos and songs that she used for inspiration. Scrapbooks, sort of, and they’re kind of beautiful. She loves them. And those are the copies that she wants you to have, not something you downloaded off ff.net with all the typos and weird formatting.
Not a copy off a copy off a copy.
Her version. In its full glory.
She can’t make promises. These are called ongoing projects for many reasons, and one of these is reality. Her blog, the space she’s using as a mid-ocean island pit stop, is where these PDFs will post, in whichever order she deems worthy because she’s fickle like that. At any given date, because she’s hard to pin down, even on a good day. She needs a little patience, mostly with herself, but Double Struck just might see the light of day at some point. Somewhere.
She gets it.
These PDFs will eventually fall into the hands of people she doesn’t want to have them, the plagiarizers and the haters, but there’s nothing she can do about that. Nothing, except rest content in the knowledge that when they do finally sit down to read her fic, they’ll understand what all the fuss was about.
And she shouldn’t tell you, she knows that she shouldn’t . . . but, fandom, her heart hurts.
Maybe more than it should. Because she’ll kind of miss you, most of you, the ones who have followed her around from story to story. She’s sorry for being such a shitty player, for never really replying to your reviews and maybe she should have done a little better at that. But she read them all, each and every one, and most of you made her cry at inopportune times, or laugh out loud in public.
Most importantly, above all else, above anyone else, this experience taught her that the only reason she started down this path some three odd years ago, was so she could eventually find Hadley Hemingway. Right now, in this moment and for the rest of the moments ever to exist ever, she is all that matters.
Because there is a future.
An HEA, even if she never was all that great at writing those.
She’s still writing. She’s still dreaming, and she’s still taptaptapping stories, Hadley’s giggles and love and fancy red pen cleaning up her mess as she goes. She’s not sure how it’s gonna work, because she’s still feeling achy and violent and bruised all over and everything hurts if she moves too fast, so she’s moving slowly. Like a caterpillar. Cocooning.
She plans to be brilliant on the other side.
She hopes to see you there.
XXOO
HBM
