Octobre

i'm so so sorry to hear about your post regarding Drift. it was and is one of my favourite wormfics ever, and i could genuinely go on and on about every detail i loved about it, and it's one of my main inspirations for my own fic i'm working on.

myself and a few others have tried to put together a reconstruction from the internet archive, but we're unfortunately missing chapters 24 and 25. would it be okay to ask for copies to finish the archived version? i can give my discord/whatever if that makes it easier

thank you so much :)

I already answered you privately, but I figured others might want it as well. Like I said, I don't mind copies circulating, as long as people temper their expectations (this is essentially a first draft) and refrain from harrassing me about stuff they didn't like.

Here's a link to the complete first draft of Drift : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HUBEMZoxxmbWS_FVq3OuWwobZWlc3A3B4jdHYWO5Rf0/edit?usp=sharing

Here's the same thing for The Artist Formerly Known As Bonesaw (it's not finished, but there's a couple chapters I hadn't published yet, plus my outline for the rest of the story) : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EmzvF2oPdYr1Cewq1mQWqjIw_-1DD2gsHK6WY5tjZZo/edit?usp=sharing

So.

Several people have reached out to inquire about why I deleted my stories.

First, let’s go back to 2019, when I first started dabbling in Worm fanfiction. It was my first real foray into writing and I approached it as I did with most things in life, with a toxic level of perfectionism. I would spend weeks rewriting the same sentence until it was perfect, even losing sleep obsessing over word choice. Obviously, this was neither healthy nor sustainable.

It’s at that time that I wrote the first few chapters of Drift before setting it aside to work on The Artist Formerly Known As Bonesaw. It was well received, but with each subsequent chapter, I had massive impostor syndrome and felt like I couldn’t live up to the previous ones.

Come March 2020, I’m at the end of my rope. Clinical burnout, due in large part to my own toxic perfectionism and years of untreated depression.

After a complete overhaul of my life, I started treatment, with trial and error of many antidepressants over the next couple years. In late 2022, we find a winning combination and I feel good for the first time in years. I channel my newfound energy into writing and editing a novel over the next six months. In July 2023, I submit my manuscript to publishers, and get a positive answer in December.

By then, I was declining again. We switched up treatment a couple more times until we hit the jackpot by adding Ritalin to the mix. It was amazing. All of a sudden, I could do things without spending hours if not days mentally bracing myself for it. All of a sudden, I had more focus and energy than I’d ever had in my life. It was like seeing the world come into focus for the first time.

I was waiting for my editor’s feedback on my novel and was too manic to work on Artist, so I dug through my WIPs for something to channel that energy into, and settled on Drift.

Over the course of five weeks, I banged out over 130k words in a Ritalin-fueled haze. Words were pouring out of me like never before and I finally felt free from perfectionism. I immediately decided that the first draft was good enough to post (take that, perfectionism!), when it actually needed a lot more time to cook and a couple rounds of developmental edits to reach its full potential.

Then, the negative comments started rolling in. I didn’t want to break away from my posting schedule (something something OCD) and felt trapped by what was already posted. At the same time, the Ritalin euphoria started receding and depression was kicking my ass again. All together, it just made me dread posting. I started procrastinating and doing less and less editing, which means that each subsequent chapter was of lower quality than the previous one, which would lead to more negative comments, and so on. By the time my editor reached out to work on my novel, I was burnt out again and glad for the excuse to quit posting.

At the same time, I dreaded her feedback, because of the impact negative comments had on me with Drift. I felt like my writing wasn’t good enough unless I literally lost sleep obsessing over word choice the way I used to, and I didn’t have the energy to do that anymore. I felt like it would never be good enough. But she was so, so good, she tore my manuscript apart in a way that made me want to thank her rather than go hide under a rock and die. She helped me grow as a writer, much more than anything masquerading as crit ever did before.

Up until then, I thought I would go back to Drift once we were done with the editing rounds, but the longer I went without touching Drift or interacting with the fandom, the more I realized how much anxiety was tied to it. I absolutely dreaded going back. Working on original fiction was a breath of fresh air compared to it.

Like, I know it’s bad, and I’ve pretty much painted myself into a corner because I can’t do the developmental edit it so desperately needs when two thirds of the story are already posted. But also, I don’t think serial fiction is for me. I think my strength lies in editing rather than drafting, and because of that, I would need to write the whole story and do several rounds of edits before posting the first chapter, which is more time and energy than I’m willing to expand on fanfiction.

Ultimately, I’m not satisfied with the story as it is and have no plan to work on it again. I regret posting it, I don’t feel that it represents me as a writer, and I’m just plain sick of people periodically sending me full-length essays ranting about everything wrong with the story, over a year after I last updated it.

Even with The Artist Formerly Known As Bonesaw, I feel like nothing I could write would live up to people’s expectations unless I actively harmed my own mental health the way I used to.

Did I nuke my stories because of that? Yes and no. I won’t say that I haven’t wanted to do it before, but like with my posting schedule, I needed an external force to intervene and break the status quo before things could change. In this case, it came in the form of someone reaching out on my IRL social media to air out their grievances with Drift after I ignored their PM. This is where I draw the line, and I don’t want that happening again.