For Safe Keeping - To Samurai-ashes

Many of you who are aware of my history and what I do will recognize this old except from my page at fanfiction.net (see the link on the left). It's a message that I wrote to samurai-ashes, the author that inspired me to start Yu-gi-oh fanfiction and to improve to reach her level overall. She's an excellent authoress, and I would encourage everyone here to both read her works on fanfiction.net as well as MediaMiner if you like either YGO or good writing in general. A couple years ago, she announced that she was leaving, and it made me very sad because of all that she is to me. She's back on and off now, but I wanted to keep the message because it embodied a lot of my perception of fanfiction in general. So I kept it up on my bio on FF.net. But now that I have this place, I think that I'm going to very much leave it here, so that I can move on from that portion of my life and rejoice in the fact that she is indeed still on ff.net. So, here I place it for safe-keeping. ^^




OLD ANNOUNCEMENT:

I wanted to announce that the authoress that inspired me to better my own writing skills and major in English (with concentration on Creative writing), samurai-ashes, is leaving fanfiction.net. She says that she’s grown out of fanfiction, and that she’s going to go into more original fiction.

I want to say, first, that I HATE it when authors/authoresses do that. I think that if you decide to become involved in fanfiction that you should do it for life. I understand that there are things in life that happen and that people want to actually be legally published and all of that, that you want an education, that people in your family pass on, that you may lose your inspiration. But I would suggest a HIATUS rather than leave fanfiction. Take myself for example. I’m in college now. I’ve been on fanfiction for almost five or six years. Things change. Interests change. But you can still connect fanfiction to them. I plan on writing fanfiction as long as possible, just so you all know. I might take a while to post things. I might be busy, but I will never QUIT, and it bothers me that people are doing that. These are people who inspire others with words. People who give others hope that yes, an anime ending might suck, but that they can read better. There is hope that one day, there will be a professional writer who began with fanfiction and knows how to do things right/the best way possible. Some of these stories affect people’s lives; they keep people from crying at night, they make people laugh right after a family member has gone. They parallel the lives of characters we love to our own, no matter if you like anime or movies or books, or if you like YAOI, YURI, or just regular HET pairings. Fanfiction is a way of life, of sustenance, and a lot of people do not appreciate it…

Samurai-ashes leaving scars me more deeply than you all will know. There were times when I wanted to quit writing fanfiction, because I thought I wasn’t good enough. I was new and scared that I had no skill. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know how to write fanfiction at all. But she helped me. She spoke to me and counseled me and through reviewing and critiquing her fiction I learned how to construct my own, how to take ideas from seemingly nothing and spin it into a nicely themed one shot, or how to write a PWP and make it so enjoyable that it was acceptable. And when she reviewed my stories, I felt like GOD had come down from Heaven and personally held a conversation with me. You all think I’m a good writer, but I wouldn’t have been HALF as good as I am now without reading her stories. I read her livejournal. I read her Mediaminer.org stories (which were slightly better, as they were unedited versions of her works and I enjoy well written lemons). I told everyone I could about her. Half of my friends read YAOI because of her story Third Grade Logic, which is one of only two stories on this entire site that made me cry while I was reading it. I was rooting for her. I loved her, and she’s leaving now…I just wish that she would reconsider, just a little. She doesn’t have to start writing new stories. I would just like her to stay and help other people develop their skills some more. There are others who will still be reading her stories months from now. Will she ignore the ‘Review Alerts’ emails? Will she refuse to reply to someone who has taken the time out to give her an honest opinion of her story? I still feel incomplete in my writing skills, and I feel like there’s a hole being ripped in my artistic soul because after she leaves, I’ll just be some stranger to her. I will no longer be ‘one of her fans’ or ‘that girl who read her stories’ or anything like that. It bothers me that, in the end, I will just be a screen name on fanfiction. She doesn’t know my name. She doesn’t know where I live, and she certainly doesn’t know how she changed my life. When I email her, she’ll think, ‘who the heck is this?’ because in the end, I mean nothing to her. I was just a portion of a part of her life that is now over.

I just had to get that off of my chest, because people quitting fanfiction breaks my heart. She was one of my favorite authoresses…

However, to cope with the loss, I will be saving all of her stories as Word Documents on my new laptop to commemorate her memory. One day, six years from now, I will find her on livejournal, or I will go to see her when her original fiction becomes published, with a copy of Third Grade Logic in my hand, and I will ask her to sign it. And I will tell her who I am. And I will tell her that I am one of her oldest fans. And I will cry. Because I fell for her writing style and she broke my heart.

I keep saying ‘samurai-ashes is leaving’. It’s a testament to my denial—

The truth is she’s already left.