Hello all. It's been a while since I last posted anything. Or logged onto my account. Or do anything revolving around my writing, really. I want to explain why I've been gone for so long, but to do so, I need to provide quite a bit of background info and context.

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know my update schedule has always been a bit scattered. Most of the time, I used to update once a month, move onto the next story, update that, then rinse and repeat. I've said before this schedule was mostly due to college and my job taking up most of my free time, but I've never gone into the details. Basically, while I was going to college, my job was at a pseudo outdoor resort/retreat center, and yes that is honestly the best way to describe it, where I was hired as a receptionist. I answered calls, checked in every guest that came through the doors, talked on the phone and scheduled in more guests for upcoming trips they wanted to take to our lovely resort, had to talk to more people for possible hours on end as I explained to them that no, we couldn't fit them in for the weekend, we were booked, then deal with them yelling at me for God knows how long, had to make sure the guests I could see weren't acting out of control else I had to inform them they either had to calm down or leave, which always led to some wonderful conversations invoicing shouting and plenty of insults, all while sitting in the world's most uncomfortable chair and then driving an hour back to my place and then collapsing into my bed.

Despite the assholes I had to deal with while working there, it was a decent job. My boss was a good person, my hours were somewhat flexible, depending on the day and how busy things were, and I liked my coworkers. The pay wasn't exactly great, but for a college student that had learn to survive off nothing but cups of ramen noodles for a month, it was enough. I could smile and nod along as asshole #121 screamed and ranted at me for mispronouncing his last name, because hey, things could be worse.

It's not even funny how right I was.

But before I get into that, let's talk about college. The college I went to was fairly standard, with professors who cared and some who didn't, classmates I liked and some I could do without, and I went through all the ups and downs most people experience here, with maybe a few more downs than the average person. I talked about how my friends and people I respected have called my writing horrible, but for a bit more context, these friends were ones I recently made, and were all people who I shared writing classes with. And I was taking writing classes because, shocker, I want to be a writer. It's been a dream of mine for so long, and the moment I entered college, I decided to do everything I could to make the dream a reality. I was planning on double majoring in English and Creative Writing, so I had a lot of classes involved in the craft of writing; some of them were good, others, I wonder how the person who was teaching them hadn't been fired. But in a lot of my classes, we often had to share a lot of pieces with each other, and so I shared something with my friends that I had been working on for a long time, something I was immensely proud of, and got told, in no uncertain terms, was shit. Even one specific girl, someone I thought was a good buddy of mine, who I had a great deal of respect for, told me that she thought it was horrible; she didn't even offer much constructive criticism, none of them did in fact. What made it worse was how, the next day, my "friends" were telling me how I should maybe "consider another career," because writing "seemed a bit above my level." Seeing all their smug, patronizing faces, the way they arrogantly told me that I wasn't "as good" as them, I told them I would give their advice the respect it deserves.

As in, none.

So, what does this have to do with the update schedule for my stories? Well, between my job, college, my desire to prove those assholes wrong, to prove to myself I was a writer, I was pushing myself to the max. I was writing about a dozen different papers or short stories or poems for every one of my classes, writing and sending even more stories to literary magazines, taking any shift I possibly could at my job to get some cash, and tried my best to update my stories for you guys. As you can probably guess, doing so much often left me exhausted. There were days when I honestly didn't feel like getting out of bed, and I always had to force myself to because I had class or had to get to my job. And when you add in all the stress of dealing with rude jerks or snobby classmates and eleven page papers due within a few days, it started to have an effect on my health. So much so, that there were times when the thought of writing a single sentence made me honestly sweat and even a bit nauseous. So, sometimes, to make sure I didn't collapse from exhaustion, I had to take a few breaks from writing. But since I couldn't do that with my schoolwork, that meant I had to take breaks on my hobby writing. As in, any writing I genuinely did for fun.

Basically, the reason why my updates were always so slow or have long hiatuses was because I was so drained from both my job and writing college papers and short stories that I could just barely complete that I couldn't write anything else without risk of having a breakdown.

And you know what, I think I did a decent enough job in making sure I didn't go insane. Sure, sometimes I had to take extended breaks, sometimes I have to force myself to sound way more happier than I actually am, sometimes I had to push myself to do the things that once came so easily to me, and still have to do so, but I still wrote whenever I had any spare time and was in a better headspace.

But, as mentioned previously, things got worse.

Let's talk about family. Everyone's got one, and I'm no different. I got a Mom and Dad, and even a little brother who is just the most adorable little smartass you've ever seen. But what I want to talk about right now, is my dad.

He almost died from a seizure.

It happened in December, before Christmas. My dad's always had a weakened immune system, one that only got worse when both of his kidneys failed. He'd been taking different medications for a while, going to the hospital for dialysis to make sure he doesn't get sicker, but one day, when he woke up, he had a bad reaction to a new batch of medicine his doctor prescribed him to help with his blood pressure, threw up for eleven minutes straight while sweating and trembling like he just ran a marathon, and then had a seizure.

After the ambulance brought him to hospital, as I sat nearby him with my mom crying hysterically into my shoulder, my brother nowhere in sight because he had broken down at the sight of our dad convulsing and screaming and had to say at a friend's house because there was no way he could handle what he would see at the hospital, I looked at the bed where my dad "rested." There were tubes shoved up his mouth and nose, the damn heart monitor nearby beeped and beeped so much and so loudly I nearly had an aneurysm listening to it while my dad moaned and thrashed with his wrists bound to the bed to prevent him from removing the tubes in his sleep, and then I thought that this would be it. That this would be the last time I would ever see him "alive." Tied to machines and tubes and being denied a chance to say goodbye to any of us.

Thankfully, I was wrong. My dad got better, and the seizure didn't damage his brain in any way, which was a big worry for me and my family at the time, and so when he was healthy enough, he went back home with all of us in tow. But I had to take some time off from writing. I had already finished the fall semester for my college, my second to last semester, in fact, so I could focus entirely on my family and helping them. We talked with a few doctors, and after some discussion, decided to do home dialysis instead of going three times a week to the hospital. So, after taking some classes to be properly trained in home dialysis, we had everything set up. We were in the beginning of February, College was starting up again, and being assured by my mom and dad they had everything under control, and that they'd call me if they needed help, I went back to complete the last semester of my senior year. I got the same receptionist job as before, though this time, I was giving a lot of what I was getting paid to my parents. We had a lot of medical bills to pay, and they still had to take care of my brother as well as themselves, so they needed all the help they could get. It's not like I was using it for much since I didn't really do much at college beyond writing papers and stories for classes, certainly not hanging out with anyone there, and I had saved enough cash where, so long as I budgeted things correctly, I thought I would be able to handle anything life throws at me.

I was wrong.

So, so, very wrong.

When March came, everything went to hell. Because this was when the coronavirus became a full scale pandemic, and wrecked everyone's shit.

I was no exception.

Now, for a bit of context, by this point in my college career, after a lot networking, internships, writing non-stop through blood, sweat, and tears, getting rejection letter after rejection letter but not giving up and even having some of my own stories physically published, I had about three interviews set up from three separate publishing companies for three different entry-level jobs, one of which, I was all but guaranteed after I graduated, and I was well on my way to double majoring, something I worked my ass off for since first getting into college. Even if I didn't get hired for those companies, I had contacts within a few other businesses in the writing industry, so I should have been able to get a decent job after I graduate. But, because of the virus, all of my plans, years of hard work, have just crumbled to dust.

The offers from publishing companies were suddenly retracted, due to them having to focus more on staying in business than on hiring, and the other companies I had contact with were a similar story, with the only difference being that most of them went out of business and my contacts were suddenly out of the job and needed to focus on keeping their families fed then helping college students get into the industry. Even my boss at the receptionist job had to let me go due to the cuts and changes he had to make because the virus meant he couldn't afford to keep me on staff. And in the process of moving classes online, a lot of the professors at my school contracted the virus, with some of them dying, or learned their family caught the virus, and they left to be with their loved ones, possibly for the last time, meaning that they couldn't teach their students. And with so many professors now gone, the school didn't have nearly enough staff that could teach in place of all the professors that left, and so, they cancelled those classes. Which meant that it was no longer possible to get credits for that course. And for me, that meant that certain core requirements that I needed to complete one of my majors were abruptly cancelled, and with no chance of that class being offered any time soon, it meant that I wasn't going to be able to get a major I literally worked every day of my life to get.

I wasn't the only one impacted, and this news caused a lot of people to get upset. The administrators at my school responded with an email apologizing for the sudden cancelations of so many classes, offered a bunch of "alternative" or "new" classes online that the students could take in place of them so they'd have enough credits to graduate, and advised people that they will, most likely, hire enough staff to fill in for the next semester who could teach in place of their predecessors, and so if anyone wanted to, they could sign up for said classes now, with seniors getting priority over anyone else. But this did nothing for the hundreds of students, myself included, that were expected to graduate that spring with a major they worked years to get, but now suddenly weren't sure if they would even be out of school within the next year, because at that point, it looked like the virus was going to be around for a while, possibly getting worse before it got better, and God only knows how it might affect the next semester.

I and a lot of other students who faced similar problems, whose careers paths were shattered, whose majors we worked hard to earn were no longer a possibility, whose job offers were now firmly in the trash, had to come to a difficult decision: take these "alternate" classes and graduate now, throwing ourselves into a pandemic-ridden world the likes of which no one has ever seen, unsure if we'll get any type of job whatsoever due to all our options being gutted like a damn fish, risking our financial futures and possibly even our lives, or, take another semester, take the classes we need to earn the majors we want, if they are even available, all while putting ourselves into even more debt for possibly zero gain.

Most of us took the first option. For me, it ultimately came down to not having nearly enough money to risk another semester, especially when I still might not get the two majors I wanted and risk putting myself in further debt for no reason, and because of my family's health. Specifically, my dad's.

Ever since the pandemic started, the thing I was terrified of the most was the health of my dad, what with him being far more susceptible to viruses due to his weak immune system. I was in contact with him and my mom every day, making sure they took proper safety precautions, and that no one went out any more than they had too. My parents' home wasn't technically in a "red zone," if only just barely, but it was in a city that was cramped enough and had a large enough population that the virus could spread very easily. Thankfully, my brother didn't have to go to in-person school by that point, and could just take his classes online, so I didn't have to worry about him as much as my dad, but he was still shaken and scared by the whole thing. I was honestly tempted to just say "screw it" and leave college to make sure my parents and brother were going to be okay, but they, as in my parents, insisted I finish school, and that they could handle their own health. They also knew that all of my job opportunities or offers I had were no longer a possibility, that the chances of me getting a job in this environment when no one was sure what the hell was going to happen were basically zero, and that I was rapidly running out of cash because of just, everything, so they said I should stay with them until I could actually get a decent job.

So, when I finished my last year of college, no graduation ceremony, just an email saying "Congratulations!" in the weirdest font I've ever seen, I left college, and immediately moved back with my parents. I didn't have the majors I worked myself to the bone to earn, just a single Creative Writing one, and only barely that, I didn't have the jobs I was sure I would have, or even any job at all, and to top it all off, I hadn't been happy with a single thing I written since December, mostly because I hadn't written anything outside of shitty short stories for my classes or bland and boring essays I had to write every other week.

I honestly never felt more defeated in my entire life. I couldn't help support my family in any way. When the first lockdowns started, my mom could do her job online, as she's an accountant, and had just enough clot in the company she worked at that she wasn't in danger of losing it, and my dad had some cash saved up over the years, so we weren't in danger of losing the house or starving. But, as the months progressed, as my mom's company faced more and more issues because of the virus, her hours became incredibly hectic and infrequent, she was no longer getting paid nearly as much as she used to, and my dad's savings seem to be drying up faster and faster. The bills were piling up; still are, in fact, with little signs of getting better. I won't lie, I have honestly had nightmares where my family and I have lost everything, ones that seem closer and closer as things get worse.

I tried to find a job. I tried to get hired anywhere, sent out what feels like thousands of emails, but seemingly every place in applied to either couldn't afford to hire any new workers, that most of the stuff I was experienced in and had included in my résumé were things that they didn't really want or need in their employees and wouldn't be useful to their business, or just told me, in a subtle, arrogant way but lacking just enough "in-your-face-insults" they could plausibly deny what they meant and I was misconstruing their words, that they wouldn't hire someone with a Creative Writing major and not a "real one."

And every time I had to step onto streets crowded with people who didn't stay far enough apart because they don't care, where some people didn't even bother to cover their damn mouths when they coughed and sneeze, I was scared of the virus. Not just because I was worried about my health, but because I was terrified of the idea of getting the virus, and then giving it to my dad.

Since I've come back from college, I've been scared shitless of the idea that I might just accidentally kill my own dad.

Every time I, my brother, or my mom go out, we make sure to scrub down thoroughly, making sure we don't get near my dad without showering first after coming back in, making sure our clothes don't so much as touch my dad's own by having separate bins for both clean and dirty clothes, and all while we check him every day for any signs of the virus. But even with all the precautions, there are times when I think he might have caught it. Because of his weakened immune system, even with all the medication, my dad still gets sick. Sometimes it's just a cough. Sometimes it's a fever or a stomach bug. Sometimes it's just him feeling tired and having to stay in bed all day. And everytime he gets sick, my family has no idea if this is just a normal virus, or if it's COVID. And not knowing, is terrifying.

When he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, coughing up a storm, sometimes even vomiting, trying not to wake anyone else up, I peek outside the door, watching him, and I think to myself, "is this it? Is this the last time I'll see my dad alive? And if it is, did I kill him?"

So, to put it simply, I haven't updated in so long because I've been emotionally and physically drained from constant college work and general feelings of exhaustion and failure, barely graduated with just a single major instead of the two I should have gotten, no job whatsoever because the virus pushed any options I had of getting hired right out the damn window and into a dumpster fire, and to top off all this awful crap, I now have to constantly worry if my own dad is gonna die because I didn't wash my hands thoroughly enough or if I happened to bump into someone with the virus and gave it to him or a million other reasons that have driven me fucking insane for the last nine months all while I do my best to try and find a job and help out my family but can't because everything is just fucked!

It's been hell, basically. For a while, I've questioned what the fuck I was thinking trying to be a writer when seemingly everyone, my peers, my professors, my friends, told me I wasn't good enough, and now don't have a job because I wasted four years of my life on the wrong degree. I started hating the fact that I wasted so much of my life on something that couldn't help me pay the bills or help my family, and I started to hate myself just as much. With every rejected job offer, with every fucking time I saw my dad coughing or watched as my mom looking haggard and exhausted as she paid another bill from a mountain of them, I started getting angrier and angrier, and I couldn't so much as look at myself without thinking "what a stupid fucking idiot." And when the anger reached its peak, when I just could barely stop myself from shouting at someone who so much as looked at me funny, when I I was forced to interact with assholes because some virus had screwed up my life enough I was forced to apply for their shitty cashier job that paid nothing, but was rejected anyway, I just...stopped. Getting angry, getting sad, getting emotional at all, because I was so tired of everything going wrong. I felt more like a living corpse than a person.

And for a while, that's all I was. Eventually I did find some part time gigs or one-off jobs that paid next to nothing, focused entirely on that job and when it was done I started immediately looking for the next, went to bed, then rinse, lather, repeat. My family noticed just how off my behavior had become, and so, had a talk with me. Multiple ones, in fact. A lot of times they involved, shouting, cursing, me being a stubborn idiot. But one day, when I was in my car, coming back from another failed grocery run because everything was either sold out or too expensive, parked outside my house, I stopped. With my car playing the news, just talking about the virus, as usual, I stared at the mirror. I saw the ugly face staring back at me, lined with stress marks and deep bags under its eyes, hair a mess and glasses cracked because the idiot wearing the face couldn't be bothered to fix either. I don't know how long I stared at it, but at some point, I leaned back in my chair, took of my mask, and just massaged my face with my hands, like that would somehow fix everything wrong with it. I asked myself, "is this how you want to spend the rest of your life." I said no, and I immediately followed up with, "then what are you going to do?"

I didn't have an answer. I just stayed in my car, staring at nothing. Eventually, I felt the need to do something, anything, so I started rummaging through my car, throwing away any garbage I could see into a big plastic bag I happened to have in my bag. I opened my glove compartment, threw away a lot of crap, but as I did so, something slid out of the compartment and onto the floor. I looked down, and I saw a small, black pocket notebook. I picked it up, and when I saw the cover, I instantly remembered where, and why, I got this.

In my second year of college, one of my writing professors had us buy a pocket notebook, and he asked us to keep it with us as much as we reasonably can. He said that whenever we had an idea for a story, no matter what it was, we should write it down in that book. When someone in the class pointed out we could do the same with our phones, he agreed, but he explained, "there's something different about writing something down on pen and paper than it is on your phones or computers. I won't lie and say it isn't convenient, it most certainly is, but on paper, you can make little edits to what you wrote that just aren't possible on a phone. You see what the past you liked about your ideas with the emphasis you put on certain words or the little notes you left just below them. Or even just how much you hated them, looking at the amount of times you crossed something out or scribbled over lines and lines of work to leave a little footnote that says, 'no. Bad idea.' You can see all the imperfections you had, and how they all added up to the story in your hands."

He didn't grade us on our ideas, just that we had a book or something similar, and he just asked us to write in it when we had the chance. I kept the book, decided I might as well use it so not to waste money, and wrote down in it, a lot, in fact, but I thought I lost it during my junior year. I opened the book up, and started to read.

It was full of ideas for fanfics.

Some of them were things I could tell I had been excited for, like an idea for a Lilo & Stitch/Pokemon Crossover, with a bunch of possible plot threads written in the tiny margins. Some were less good; I still have no idea what past me was thinking when they wrote "E.T Vs the Predator (and maybe Schwarzenegger)". One of them, a JoJo Phantom Blood and Hellsing Crossover, was something that rapidly spawned a hundred ideas in me, and thinking about all the ways that the crossover could go, all the battles that could take place, before I knew it, I felt excited at all the stories suddenly spawning in my head.

But the excitement, and the ideas, left just as quickly as they appeared. It was fun thinking about fanfics, but my life was just too hectic now to focus on things like that. I needed a job now more than ever. I loved writing, but no one was paying me to do so.

I swear, in that moment, the dome light of my car turned on, whether because it had been on the fritz all week, divine intervention, I don't know, but what I did know, was that I had an idea. Something that could help me revive dreams I thought were dead, and help out my family at the same time. "But," I asked myself, "should I take a risk and follow it?" I looked back at my little pocketbook, then at my house, imagining my sick father, my tired mother, or my scared brother and the bills we still had to pay, how I couldn't find any sort of decent paying job and how the virus seemed to get worse and worse with every day. I thought how miserable I was, how often my mother said that I was just so monotone and lifeless, how worried my father was about my own health rather than his own declining health, how even my own brother seemed to think there was something wrong with me as he tried to help, and how just by holding a book full of ideas I felt better than I had in months.

In a shitty car outside my house, I came to a decision, and let out my battle cry.

"Fuck it!"

Which brings me to now.

My last gambit. What may very well be the last things I'll ever have the chance to write if things don't look up. I am now using my writing and the following I have gathered to help me and my family in our hour of need.

So I ask you all, if you can, to please support me on p a tr eon.

Yes, I opened an account. Full of tiers, rewards, and everything else you'd expect, all under the name Black Mage of Phantasm.

Let me say right now, this is not a paywall of any sort: chapters will not be "exclusively" held only on p a tr eon, and neither will anyone get any "advances" on any chapters of mine if they are a member, or any similar types of incentives. I will upload anything and everything I write the moment they're complete, as I have been doing since I started posting my stories online. There will be rewards should you become a member, like access to a private Discord, feedback for any of your works, one-on-one writing advice and more, but the main point of this p a tr eon is to let anyone who is willing to help support me financially, and also allow me to focus more on my writing as every bit helps me take care of my family.

I know some people have mixed feelings at best when it comes to this sort of thing, but right now, with the virus making getting a steady job all but impossible for me, I need as much cash as possible to deal with a mountain of college debt and medical bills. I won't pretend money doesn't play a role in my decisions, but with the financial troubles we're facing, I need to help my family in any way I can. After everything they've done for me, everything they've gone through, I'll use anything and everything at my disposal to help them out, and that includes my writing. But that doesn't mean I'm only doing this for money, because let me tell you, when I started writing again, when I put the words down onto the page for the first time in what feels like a lifetime ago, I felt happy. I can't remember a time I wrote so much in so little time, and I am more than willing to put this new energy to good use.

I know things are awful for just about everyone right now, but for anyone that has money to spare, all I ask is that you consider make a contribution to my account, and I'll try to make any rewards I offer worth whatever amount you pledge. Thank you all for taking the time to read this author's note. To my friends, I'm sorry I suddenly stopped talking to you or never responded to your messages; I just needed to get away.

If this was a bit rambly, apologies, but I wrote this all in one sitting. Regardless of if you pledge to my account or not, know that I love every single reader of my stories with all my heart. For now, I must say goodbye, as I look for another job, and try to squeeze out as many words as I can during every bit of my free time.