Notice

Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well. It's been a while since my last update, and that is because, after weeks of deliberation, I decided to cancel this story. I'm very sorry to everyone who was following and that (judging by the reviews) was actually enjoying this. I know the feeling of enjoying a story just to see it canceled very well, and I was sure that I would never be one to kill my own projects once started. You have the right to be irritated and disappointed. However, I want you to know why I made this choice before you judge me too hard.

It all boils down to this: I no longer enjoyed writing this story, I didn't feel much sympathy towards these characters, and there was no real plot. I think the latter is the reason for the former two. If you want a more detailed explanation, keep reading until the bold letters at the end.

When I finished The Ones that were Lost, I felt very good and confident with myself, so I decided to take on more challenging projects. I had heard that writing a story through diaries and other documents (an 'epistolary' narrative, if you want to sound fancy and snobbish) was very hard to do. But I thought to myself: "If I managed to finish a fic that's almost 200 thousand words long over 2 and a half years, that's mostly first person, with a bunch of characters and three arcs, while still getting a good number of positive reviews, I can do it!" So, soon after Pizzeria Simulator and inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula, I started Henry's Journals.

Turns out that my planning strategy for everything that I had written so far didn't work very well for this kind of format. I had a vague idea for a plot, spanning everything from Fredbear's to the events of FNaF 6, but I didn't put enough thought into it. Connectivity, something that's already hard for me, seemed impossible. How could I describe what I wanted, while still making it seem like something that a normal guy would write in his journal? It just didn't seem possible to make everything flow naturally. Stoker could, but I'm nowhere near that level. I feel bad even comparing myself to him. I'm still a beginner who overestimated himself.

So, I decided that I'd simply go from Fredbear's to the Missing Children's Incident since I'd already written Lost which begins with the MCI. Not because I wanted to connect both stories, but because I didn't want to write the same events twice. I thought that I'd simply go from chapter to chapter and that eventually a plot would arise. It didn't. All I really wrote in 7 chapters were separate events that don't really serve a general, continuous narrative. Writing a story without a plot is like designing a car with no wheels. You can have cool passengers for the ride (characters), a very nice car (the main idea), and beautiful scenery during the trip (the setting), but with no wheels, you're not getting anywhere, no matter how hard you push.

And I pushed hard. I really put a lot into effort into trying to make a chapter interesting, even if it mostly ended up being about the mundane and boring problems of a young entrepreneur. I wanted to make this story more 'adult' by leaving out fantastical/bizarre elements, even though this is a franchise about floating puppets giving life to super advanced robot animals in the 80s through the souls of kids murdered by a goddamn British furry. Turns out, I still need some level of fantastical/bizarre for a plot to be interesting. I wanted to focus exclusively on human characters. Turns out, purely human characters bore me after some time when it comes to writing; reading's fine though. I wanted to describe a general plot through journal entries. Turns out, I'm nowhere near good enough for that, and I didn't have a good idea for a general plot in the first place.

So, the story became very difficult to write and I didn't get much enjoyment from it, because I didn't really feel like I was going anywhere. I didn't hate writing individual passages; I'm actually kind of proud about Lorena's death and satisfied with my descriptions in general. Nonetheless, I never cared much for these characters, because I didn't get to put them in really interesting situations, and I never would, because I decided to focus exclusively on everything before the MCI, which is where the interesting stuff actually starts!

I wanted to highlight the fact that I never felt much empathy for these characters. This is very strange for me. I cried a lot multiple times while writing Lost because I felt with the characters. It pained me to see them suffer and it made me happy when they had little happy moments. Even with Broken, which was much shorter, I still felt sympathy towards Christopher. I didn't feel much of anything when I killed Lorena. I think that if you're telling a story, and you don't feel attached to your characters, you're not really enjoying it. And if you're not enjoying it, and you're not getting paid, then why are you writing it in the first place?

My apologies for this oversized, chapter-long rant. I haven't really written in a while and I wanted to get this off my chest.

So, what's next?

I will take a break from fanfiction until I finish a few shortish original tales that I really want to write. Then I will write a longer fic based on Richard Adam's Watership Down. Odds are very few people will read it. I don't care; I just want to write something for myself and not publish it until it's done. Then I will start thinking about writing a short novel.

I don't think I will go back to FNaF stories in the near future. I still love those games to death, I still follow the news and visit the forums occasionally, I'm just not as obsessed as I was a few years ago. I actually started a few FNaF one-shots but I couldn't bring myself to finish them. To be honest, 4 years is more than enough time. I want to refresh myself by writing different things before going back and finishing those one-shots.

Through it all, this story actually taught me a lot about what kind of writer I am and what skill-level I'm on (still a noob). Once again, I'm sorry and I thank you for your support with this fic while it lasted. However, it was fundamentally flawed since the start, and the time I spent on it could've been much better spent on other projects. Like Scott Cawthon himself said about FNaF World on Reddit: "There comes a point where you have to stop pouring sugar on a turd and start baking a cake."

Happy reading and happy writing,

-Harmonics