Oh my god, she's alive.

Yeah I am, and I can only apologise like... I mean I don't even know what to say.

There was like a whole life and a pandemic and... all sorts of breakdowns and up-downs and what have you, but I am here and this has been sitting heavily on my chest since then. The beauty of this is, that I grew up a bit in that time and it's given me time to ponder how to continue this. Rewriting books that we all know and (mostly) love is a chore and I feel like it was hampering my progress a bit, so we're going to peel it back a bit.

I have always promised you that I won't ever leave it unfinished and though I know a lot of you have grown up and moved on, I wanna honour that promise. To that end, I've been slowly rewriting Births and Deaths to kinda make it less... clunky. I might leave the other two cos rewriting has turned into a lot of work. But then I've also rewritten this fic a little, just to tighten it up and I'm going to start uploading it soon. This story - however - remains unfinished at this exact moment but I am working on getting more done. At this point, I have 16 chapters written and the ending done. I just have to get the middle bit sorted.

I'm not quite sure whether to upload Births and Deaths as a brand new fic or replace the old one with new chapters? I feel like that might be a bit sad, in a way. That was my first multi-chapter fic I ever wrote and I kinda like the idea of preserving that. So lemme know what you think. I don't have the same qualms with this one, so over the next day or two I'll be replacing all the current chapters with the new ones.

Somehow I'm going to rejig this so it's at the front as well.

So. If you are still around and interested, let me know what you think - whatever it is cos I'm a big girl, I can handle it - and let me know whether I should replace Births and Deaths or post it as an updated version separately. I'm also working on moving my stuff over to Ao3. I don't really know how to do this cos it would be in reverse order but I guess let me know what you think about that too.

Guess that's it really. I really really appreciate you all. I know a few of you have hung on with me while I wrote other things and I just... I promise I never forgot. I've been dragging this around with me for all this time with twice as much disappointment in myself as you guys probably have for me.

So. I am sorry. But I'm going to try and do my best to get this done.

I love you all, genuinely. Thank you for sticking with me.