Hello everyone. If you haven't noticed, I've become something of a liar to all of you that have followed or favorited my story. Funnily enough, it continued to gain followers and favorite right up until I deleted all of its content and placed the placeholder update in it's place. Wonder if I could have said place in that sentence any more times? Anyhow, it is with a severely heavy heart that I'm telling you, contrary to what I sent many of you in a PM or whatever the update says. I am not going to be updating Red Rover ever again. There will not be another chapter. There will not be any more updates or edits, and I won't be reuploading the whole story so that it can be enjoyed by those who followed it. In truth, I'm not capable of reuploading it, for a myriad of reasons. For starters, I don't have access to all of the files of the story any more. I've switched computers twice since I started writing this story, and I neglected to migrate files, so I only have limited access to the content I hastily deleted and didn't back up. And secondly, I've grown as a writer since I wrote that, and reading through what I do have, has frankly, made me embarrassed. I know for a fact that I could produce something better than what I wrote, and I know for a fact that I absolutely did not perform at my absolute best for you all. I apologize, you all deserve better than what I offered you, even if you yourselves liked it, I couldn't bear to have my name on it when I know that it wasn't my best work. I've not given up on writing fully, and I don't intend to. I do intend to keep writing fanfiction, but it will not have the same issues that Red Rover had, among which was me trying to shoehorn in too many original characters where they didn't belong. It should have stopped at a team. That isn't to say that the original characters that were added weren't good, but they didn't belong, and in my opinion, wrecked the flow of the story. To top that, they put constraints and expectations on the story that I wasn't capable of reaching consistently, which is a massive issue. And finally, there were simply too many originals added in, that trying to show their stories and how they fit in detracted from the entire purpose of the story, and it completely wrecked what I was trying to do, prying me away from what I wanted when I started Red Rover in the first place, which kills me. In short, my future fanfictions will have fewer, if any, original characters. Secondly, I am going to keep to a more freeform schedule, and try for one to two chapters a month, instead of trying to push out multiple a week, and end up killing myself trying to meet arbitrary deadlines that I know I won't meet. I'd rather have a slow and steady rate of chapters coming out rather than spit out a plethora of shoddily written, poorly thought out messes and then go dark because I can't keep up with my own deadlines. For any of you who would be interested in knowing, though, I haven't given up on the idea of Red Rover, and I don't really think I ever will. I will come back to it, some time, when I feel I'm ready, but for the mean time, this problem child will stay in its room, until its ready to play nice. If you're reading this, I'm going to delete this whole story around a week after I post this apology.
Thank you all for following, and favoriting this story. I'm sorry that I let you down the way I have.
Sincerely, with love,
James.
