Note: This entire Chapter is an Author's Note
... Hello my lovely readers… my super-patient, awesome, lovely readers.
So before I say anything else I'm just going to say this: I will be finishing this story. But I wont be able to post another chapter until mid-April at the latest. And… there's a huge reason why.
When I first started writing this fanfiction, I honestly was just writing off the high of how badly I thought Naruto ended. I was upset and I wanted to create a "better ending", an ending that actually touched on a lot of the themes that Kishimoto brought up in the story. Most notably, I wanted to really dismantle his world. I mean, this is a world where it's canon that 6 year olds are on the battlefield; it's messed up. And so while this story is really dark, I wanted to just make it more realistic with the things that he was bringing up. …That and I love drama.
And when I started writing this and I started to get so much amazing feedback from everyone it was really amazing! So I kept writing. I kept adding to this idea because I enjoyed writing it and because I enjoyed pleasing my audience.
But as time passed, a lot of things in my real life started to impact my writing. For one; I went off to University (I'm in my last year now) and my family broke down because of abuse. I discovered that I had a mental illness, and that illness lead to several suicide attempts. I was in a position where I had to leave home without any money of my own and start living on my own at 18, without any real guides on how to take care of myself, nor how to balance a job and school. Then, the Black Lives Matter campaign began to get very serious, and as a Black girl it was really hard to see so many people dying every day. All of these issues worked in tandem with a developing case of imposter syndrome. Despite everything that I was doing here, I didn't think I was a good writer. I didn't think I could do this. And eventually, as the plot progressed I found it harder and harder to tackle the themes that I wanted to, until everything became too much, and hence my two and a half year absence from this fic.
I took some time away from this fanfiction and went to get some help. I've been in therapy, I've reconnected with some members of my family, and gradually as school went on things became more bearable. Most notably, I entered the Creative Writing department at my school, and I started working on a concept for my own universe of novels and short stories. It's not very similar to Naruto; it's Afro-Fantasy, based off of the histories of Africa and Asia. While I was in this program I met with an award winning author, and when I wrote she and the rest of my class loved my work. And so my writing became better, and so my mental health became better. Yes, COVID-19 is happening now, but where I am we should be vaccinated in the coming months. So I think that things are getting better for me, and so I feel that I'm mentally ready enough to get back and finish this thing.
I wont be able to update until sometime in April though, because I'm finishing the first draft of my first novel, and I need to focus. As for how the rest of this story will go, well, it's not going to be as good as my original fiction. For one, this fic is waaay too long already. 450k words is how long some fantasy TRILOGIES are, not a singular fic. You might notice that the remaining chapters might be a bit shorter as a result. I also think that I collapsed over the sheer amount of characters that I tried to write about in this fic. Even in my original fiction, I had to focus on one perspective in order to make things legible. What this means is that the rest of this story will focus mostly on Shikamaru, Shikadai, Gaara and Kankuro. I will write epilogues for the rest of the characters though, they just wont be the main focuses. Also, the final resolution might not make a lot of power level sense. But then again, in the main story the final arc had everyone fighting against one guy and an army of zombies so I think I'm good.
Once again though, and I can't stress this enough, thank you all for reading this fic, all of these years. Thank you for leaving reviews, thank you for sharing this fic with your friends, thank you for continuing to check in after all of these years. You've all contributed to me becoming a better author in a lot of ways! And thank you for being patient with me! Soon you'll get the ending you've been waiting for!
Love,
-BrokenWonderstruck