Tyler Song sat at her laptop, wasting yet another day of her life surfing the web. On a whim, she decided to check her email account. To her surprise, she saw a new message that was not spam. It was a notification from . She opened the message, and that familiar feeling of pride and guilt filled her gut. It was another review for her story And Now I Need You, one of her South Park fanfictions. The review was the standard, "OMG, when are you gonna continue this?! It's so gooooood!" It made her happy that people still read her work, but she hated herself a little for every ecstatic remark.
When Tyler was about 15 years old, she wrote another fanfiction called And Then I Met You. It was also based in the South Park universe, and focused on the budding relationship between her original character Betty Daniels and Kenny McCormick. The amateur author did not expect her story to get too much attention at first, especially since she could practically smell the cheesiness in every sentence she wrote. But overtime, she was proven to be wrong. With every chapter she uploaded, more and more people wrote reviews of how well written the fanfiction was and how they were eagerly awaiting the next update. She had always known that she had an uncanny ability with the pen, and seeing how many people genuinely enjoyed her story gave her more confidence in her skills.
Only there was one problem. She was still young and inexperienced. She was still new to the world of fandoms, and she had no restraints on herself. Scenes that were meant to happen to her characters were tossed aside in favor of unnecessary scenes for Tyler's own personal amusement.
A year later, Tyler went against her better judgment and began to work on the sequel And Now I Need You. She wanted to post the first chapter on the anniversary of ATIMY, even though she was nowhere near ready for it. The young girl was still burned out from writing her first story, and she began to write her sequel far too early in its timeline. She hated the direction it was starting to go in, but she didn't know how to change it. Tyler had eventually lost her interest in writing altogether. Despite the amount of love she had for the story, the characters, and the small amount of fans she was accumulating, no amount of reviews or favorites could motivate her to finish what she had started.
Now, the 19 year old woman stared longingly at the screen of her laptop, and at the bittersweet reminder of what she once had. The fact of the matter was that Tyler had not completely given up on her story; at least, not yet. She had plans for ATIMY, as well as ANINY. Her writing skills had improved dramatically, and she wanted to try re-writing ATIMY by taking out the unnecessary scenes and bringing the original concepts back into the plot. As for the sequel, Tyler knew what she was going to do. She was going to write a few short fanfictions that would be considered "canon" for the series. That way, when the story ANINY was ready to be published, she would not have to take up three to five paragraphs explaining why this person is important, what that object means, so on and so forth.
Every single time Tyler received an email from , these plans would flash through her head. Then, she would prop her chin up in her hands and sigh wearily. Her scheme was sound in theory, but it was mentally exhausting at the same time. She still could not bring herself to do it. The young author had absolutely no idea how to go about it. To make matters worse, she could not open the original files. Tyler had typed out the story on the outdated family computer, so her laptop would not recognize them.
Frustrated, Tyler stood up and began to pace the floor of her tiny bedroom. She scratched her head, scowled at her reflection in the mirror, and grunted as she threw her head back. "What the heck am I supposed to do, huh? How exactly am I gonna pull this off? And what about my readers? The readers that, apparently, keep growing more and more every day! How am I supposed to tell them what I am up to?" Tyler flopped face first onto her bed, groaning into the mattress. "On top of work, college, and technical problems," she muttered. "This is making me want to do it even less."
Ty turned her face just enough to where she could peek at her laptop through one eye. The email was still pulled up, and she could read the excited review from her bed. She reminded herself of all the fanfictions she read that were never updated again. "I used to hate that," she said to herself. "I always said that they might as well take the whole story down instead of leading other people on like that. Yet, here I am doing the same thing." Her face twisted into one of annoyance. "But I'll be darned if I let myself be one of thosewriters!"
She pushed herself off the bed with renewed tenacity and sat back down at her laptop. She pulled up Microsoft Word and watched as the little black cursor blinked furiously at her. Tyler cupped her chin in her hand, frowning as she made the wheels in her head try to turn. "How should I go about this?" she mumbled. Her gaze flitted around the empty space before her while she thought, a habit she had developed at some unknown point in her life. She finally settled on one spot of the screen when she remembered an old idea from a few months ago. It was quickly dismissed at the time for being a little silly (also because she had no idea what category it would be uploaded under). "Well," she thought. "I can't come up with anything else. I may as well use it. I just hope my followers actually open it!" After a few minutes of struggling to come up with a decent opening line, and failing miserably, she decided on a very simple, rather lame sentence, in her opinion:
"Tyler Song sat at her laptop…."
